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TENDERFOOT DAYS 

IN TERRITORIAL UTAH 

BY 

GEORGE ROBERT BIRD 

ILLUSTRATED 




BOSTON 
THE GORHAM PRESS 

MCMXVIII 



Copyright, 19 18, by Richard G. Badger 









All Rights Reserved 



APR -4 \m 



Made in the United States of America 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 
-©CLA492841 



FOREWORD 

This book is neither a History nor a Topog- 
raphy of the Territory of Utah in the early 
seventies of the last century. The volume is due 
to the experiences of an outsider who tried to be 
impartial in his views and sympathies. The per- 
sonal note, of course, rings in this record of those 
past days. No onslaught is made on the "wild 
and woolly" west, nor on the eccentric religion of 
the majority of the people. 

Through much peril and privation, the wild 
wastes of the Territory had been occupied by a 
people whose hard toil had redeemed the desert. 
The picture of life presented in these pages is in 
accord with the facts, the only changes made are 
in the names of some of the characters. 



CONTENTS 



I. 

II. 

III. 

IV. 

V. 

VI. 
VII. 

VIII. 

IX. 

X. 

XL 

XII. 
XIII. 
XIV. 

XV. 



Going West in 1874 . . . 

A Far West City .... 

Pilgrims to a Modern Zion . 

Church, State and Camp . 

The Co-Operative Industry of 
Utah 

The Valley Settlements . 

A Long Ride Through Utah 
Valley 

Through Spanish Fork Can- 
yon and Thistle Valley . 

Opposition to the Liberal 
Schools 

Behind the Curtain . . . 

The Creed that Caused the 
Deed 

The Passing Prophet . . . 

The Mixed Multitude . . 

The Old Prospector . . . 

A Lively Mining Camp . . 



9 
18 
29 
39 

49 
56 

63 

72 

80 
92 

104 
119 
129 
138 
154 



6 Contents 

CHAPTER PAGE 

XVI. The Town and Canyon of 

American Fork 167 

XVII. Tenderfoot Superintendents . 178 
XVIII. A Tenderfoot's Romance . .191.. 
XIX. Mind as the Master Worker . 209 
XX. A Latter Day View of a Lat- 
ter Day State 215 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
Sage Brush . . s » Frontispiece 



FACING PAGE 


puffalos ..... 


. 16 


Great Salt Lake .... 


32 


jSalt Lake Desert .... 


64 


Rocky Mountains .... 


96 


Wasatch Mountains 


128 


Dead Man's Falls, Little Cottonwood 


160 


Bears ...... 


192 



TENDERFOOT DAYS 



TENDERFOOT DAYS 

IN TERRITORIAL UTAH 
CHAPTER I 

GOING WEST IN 1 874 

I WAS one of the multitude of young men who 
heeded Horace Greeley's advice, "Go West, 
young man, go West!" in the days when he was 
the ruling spirit of the New York Tribune. Dis- 
credited as a prospective president by the people 
at the polls, he yet was accepted by many as a 
prophet of agricultural authority on the "Oppor- 
tunity of the Great West." 

To me, from boyhood, the word "Mississippi" 
had a winsome charm. I had read of De Soto and 
the Jesuit Fathers as the first voyagers on the 
great river of the West, of the Lewis and Clark 
explorations by the pen of Washington Irving in 
his Astoria: and to go West, was my one aim as 
conditions were ripe for it. The great lakes to 
the North and the cane-brakes to the South were 



io Tenderfoot Days 

not in it with the West as a drawing card to me. 

I left the charmed scenery of central New York 
state in the early spring of '74 headed for the 
wonderful Porkopolis of Chicago. That city was 
just beginning to rise from the ashes of the ter- 
rible fire of '71 when I first set foot in it. Wide 
areas resembling San Francisco in 1906 were 
black with the fire's work, and temporary board 
structures even at the depots were in common evi- 
dence. But there was the tang and the vim of 
the West in the faces of its hustling population 
that foretold the vigorous growth of after years. 

Crossing Ohio, I passed through the famous 
Western Reserve, supposed to be, in its day, the 
real West. When I saw the orderly neatness of 
farm, road, and townsite, I smiled at the invita- 
tion of an old college chum of the previous year; 
"When you are in the West be sure to call on me 
in the Western Reserve. I liva at Youngstown, 
Ohio." 

The "Father of Waters," as the Indians so 
fitly call the Mississippi, was bank-full when I 
crossed it one Tuesday morning. The prairies 
of Illinois and Wisconsin were green with the 
early spring color that also clothed the trees along 
the borders of this great stream. I was not dis- 
appointed, save with the awkwardly built stern- 
wheel steamers, that were either wildly swinging 



Going West in 1874 n 

down or laboriously puffing up its course. When 
I stepped off the cars at Dubuque, Iowa, at last 
fairly West, I delighted in the breezy speech and 
the freedom of the people; men and women of 
adaptation to circumstances, — of a width of view 
like the plains that they were subduing. 

For a year Iowa with its agricultural beauties 
along the Mississippi held me prisoner. Then the 
craving for the far West took hold of me as I 
heard the accounts of the returning pioneers of 
Kansas or Nebraska. The plague of locusts had 
driven them back and they had returned for sup- 
plies for another start. 

It will be remembered that Uncle Sam was 
more than generous in his land gifts at this time. 
The pre-emption laws allowed pioneers to buy 
outright one hundred and sixty acres of the best 
level land in Iowa and Minnesota at one dollar 
and twenty-five cents an acre. Five years' time 
was given to pay for this, no other obligation was 
required beyond the settler's own interests to live 
on it and improve it. 

I saw, as I travelled west, hundreds of these 
pre-emptors at work building small sod or frame 
houses, and breaking up the heavy grassed prai- 
ries. The cars to western Iowa and Minnesota 
were crowded every day with land seekers. The 
Danes, Norwegians and Swedes were mainly in 



12 Tenderfoot Days 

evidence; so new to the country that they could 
not make themselves understood, but had to talk 
through their agents when inquiring, or buying. 
These people's descendants of this day are the 
intelligent and prosperous farmers of the choicest 
locations in country and town. Beginning with 
nothing but their brawn and industry, they are 
independent citizens of the best prairie states. 

I crossed another great river at Omaha, the 
Missouri. With the imagination of youth, I saw 
the older population of this country of illimitable 
plains. The Pawnees, the Sioux, the Omahas, 
whose gatherings gave the name to Council Bluffs, 
upon the Iowa side. I saw also the black rolling 
tide of bison racing before the yelling red hunters 
or before the redder tongues of prairie fires. 
While I was denied my hope of running down a 
buffalo, I was able to see several of them in their 
wild state, as I went farther west. A great and 
reckless slaughter had thinned them down but 
one did not then have to visit a government park 
to see a buffalo. 

It was a great event in that day for the over- 
land express to leave Omaha for San Francisco. 
People made preparation for this pullman ride 
with all the gravity of a sea voyage. Baskets of 
supplies, wraps, rugs, and dust coats filled the 
arms of the passengers boarding the cars. 



Going West in 1874 13 

The express averaged sixteen miles an hour, 
including stops. The road-bed was of very light 
caliber and simply spiked down without fishplates, 
allowing no forty miles an hour speed. We 
swayed and teetered along some parts of the road 
in a way that reminded me of a branch line on 
the Grand Trunk in Canada, where the train 
dipped and curtseyed in the cuttings like a sail 
boat on the lakes. No harm came of it. We 
stopped often for fuel and water, and to oil up 
the small, wide-funneled engine, or to cool a hot- 
box in the heavily freighted baggage car. 

The winds of Nebraska are worthy of men- 
tion for they are in the business of blowing, and 
if the people are much affected by them, they are 
certainly in danger of being the biggest boosters 
of the West. Anyway, I saw the effect of these 
constant winds on all faces; the men being as red 
as Indians and the women, despite the long poke 
bonnets they wore, were almost as brown. Ma- 
dame Recamier's cream so much advertised then, 
should have had a great sale in Nebraska, if the 
women were at all solicitous of their complexions. 
But they were all of stern stuff and did not mind 
the Nebraska breezes, whether hot as a blast in 
summer, or cold as a blizzard in winter. They 
were a people that moved as briskly as their 
winds, going at top speed in their buggies and on 



14 Tenderfoot Days 

horseback. 

I saw women riding astride and they rode like 
cowboys. There were villages of marmots or 
prairie dogs and these little canines shared their 
earth-holes with both snakes and owls. Once in 
a while "Lo," the Indian, in his native costume 
was seen on a hill near-by sitting on his cayuse, 
stoically viewing the white man's fire wagons as 
they trailed past. These natives were also in 
evidence at every eating station, either to sell 
their bead and buffalo ornaments, or to share in 
the white man's fire-water. 

Those were the days of corn-whiskey, as yellow 
as gold and as hot as fire, and which keeled over 
the drinker at "forty rods." The western men 
aboard the cars, filled up with four fingers of this 
stuff at every stop. Temperance was not to the 
fore then and the front streets of railroad towns 
were given up to saloons of vigorous titles, and 
they were black with men from the cattle ranges 
around. These bandy-legged bravos whooped 
and rode races with the cars and even wasted 
some ammunition in celebration of the passing 
express, that scarcely out-speeded their ponies. 

Those days are gone. The cowboy is now his- 
toric. The open range is now homesteaded or 
desert-claimed by the nester. The great meat 
manufactory has passed from the range, and is 



Going West in 1874 15 

now in the hands of the farmer, who stall-feeds 
his cattle on the cultivated roots and grains of 
the ranches. 

With the next morning's sun we saw the faint 
outline of the Rocky Mountains. We had been 
slowly climbing and the elevation was sufficient 
to lower the horizon line of this backbone of the 
continent. I was interested to see with my own 
eyes those mountains made famous in my boy- 
hood days by the stories of that writer for boys, 
Captain Mayne Reid. 

Though the scenes that he so graphically de- 
scribed were in the great range farther to the 
south, and on the Mexican border, yet the name, 
Rocky Mountains, satisfied me that I was in the 
neighborhood of those old friends Rube and 
Geary in Scalp-Hunters, or The War Trail. We 
are more or less children and beneath the layers 
of riper years, lie recumbent the old imaginations 
of youth. So I sat and deamed again my boy- 
hood hours and felt young, though sad, since I 
could never be a boy again, nor see the boy com- 
panions of those book days. Scattered to the four 
corners of the globe, some at sea, some at antip- 
odes, some citified and thus changed; and one 
old chum gone away to the far country from which 
no traveller returns. 

What a day that was for the prospector and 



1 6 Tenderfoot Days '■■ 

the cattle man! The sheep-man, so omnipresent 
in Australia, was despised and seldom seen in this 
great West. The cattle owner hated the sheep- 
man almost as much as he did the Indian. It was 
the day of gun rule, for the sheriff and the con- 
stable were persons few and far between. The 
reprobate was in the land by voice and deed. All 
the dare-devils and the scum of the East drifted 
this way, and were stranded like river debris, in 
these little, hideous shanty railroad towns. Ten 
years earlier these characters ran everything to 
suit themselves. The war was still raging, and 
Uncle Sam's hands full, thus giving the rowdy 
and robber full swing to kill and steal. Some of 
these gentry were still about, with faces hardened 
by excess and crime, yet the great majority had 
gone to the greater majority via the hangman's 
rope or the hands of the Vigilante Committee and 
the yet quicker way of the sawed off shot-gun. 

Next came the canyons. I had always thrilled 
at that word; it seemed to suggest roaring waters, 
Mexican riders and red-men yelling. These can- 
yons were tame, the surveyors had selected the 
best grades and the engineers had made a level 
road for the rails. We went orderly along these 
mountain streets, with little noise beyond the tired 
asthmatic cough of our over-taxed engines, for 
we now had two engines to draw us up these 



Going West in 1874 17 

heights. How frail they looked, compared with 
the immense monsters of to-day, dun colored and 
mighty, without brightness or glitter beyond their 
headlight! Our engines were gaudy ones, brass 
bound, bright-painted, polished to the shining 
point, showing all their works to the onlooker; 
the cylinder and driving-rods working in full view. 
We halted at last to change cars; it was Ogden, 
at the junction of the Union and Central Pacific 
Railroads. 

We saw here, for the first time, the orange- 
colored cars, which took all over-landers to Cali- 
fornia. I was not booked for the real sea, but 
was bound for the Great Salt Lake, or Salt Sea, 
in Utah Territory. As I looked around I missed 
the green earth and the wide expanse of the 
plains. I found that I was among rocks of craggy 
height, overlooking little narrow valleys, where 
irrigation was needed to make things grow. I was 
in the far West at last though I knew that there 
was a farther West, which some day I meant to 
see. A lazy train soon started with the regula- 
tion speed of sixteen miles to the hour and we 
slowly passed along the south line of the Salt 
Lake, a sea so dead and dreary that it resembled 
the dead sea of that memorable land, ancient 
Palestine. Then we came, at last, to the city of 
the Latter Day Saints. 



CHAPTER II 



A FAR WEST CITY 



"Westward the course of Empire takes its way/' 

Berkley 

SALT LAKE CITY was a real city for that 
day. It was not an electrically wired and 
telephonic town, for all those and related con- 
veniences were then unknown to the multitude. 
The telephone was yet in its infancy and a curious 
toy to the initiated in electricity. It was a city 
of twenty-five thousand people, mainly Mormons 
by religion and emigration from the prairie west, 
with a thin fringe of others locally known by way 
of contrast as Gentiles. 

The further strange thing was that most of 
these adventurous Gentiles were Jews. The He- 
brew is an enterprising shopman and into these 
new valley communities and freshly organized 
mining camps, he had pushed his way to sell his 
goods, — and he was making good at his trade as 
he always does on the frontier. 
!§ 



A Far West City 19 

There was a sprinkling of the South; men of 
broken fortunes since the close of the Civil War — 
who could not endure the changes made by the 
emancipation of the colored man, and who pre- 
ferred to face their poverty in new surroundings. 
Thus their pride could not be offended or tram- 
pled on by former slaves. 

There were men of the cowboy and hunter 
class with belted waist-line and prominent gun, — 
not exactly gunmen, for these were usually of the 
professional gambler class, but men who knew 
how to use a gun and based their claims upon a 
gun. Then again the investor and the traveller 
were there in ever-increasing numbers, nosing out 
the golden opportunities always found in a newly- 
opened country. 

For it must be remembered that up to the time 
of the close of the Civil War, Utah Territory 
was a closed section to all save those whose af- 
filiations with the dominant religion of the region 
were cordial and sympathetic. 

The soldier was then in his camp on the en- 
virons of the city but this military host was resi- 
dent as a military police, keeper of the peace, and 
main reason why Uncle Sam was recognized as 
overlord of these mountain valleys. Outside of 
these residents, the rest — a vast majority — were 
the peculiar people known among themselves as 



20 Tenderfoot Days 

the Latter-Day Saints. 

As I stood on Main Street, Eastside, that first 
day in Salt Lake City, I recalled with a thrill that 
I had seen that identical spot in a very inferior 
picture some eight years before. It was at a show 
given by Artemus Ward of humorous fame, in a 
lecture given by him in the Egyptian Hall, Lon- 
don. This gifted fun-maker was in the last stages 
of pulmonary tuberculosis, with hatchet features 
telling of the swiftly approaching end. Yet his 
eyes were bright and his speech alight with humor. 
With wit he rehearsed his story of the Mormons, 
and apologized for the unusual inferiority of these 
picture daubs to illustrate Utah scenes. He 
showed with comical enthusiasm, "the Main 
Street, Eastside," which he further explained was 
"the eastside of Main Street, Salt Lake City"; 
and the one story brick block, faithfully pictured, 
was the very block and corner where I now stood 
recalling this former introduction. This sad-faced 
funmaker was long gone to his rest, but his laugh 
seemed to echo about the locality. 

The climate here is genial. Something of the 
oriental was given to the looks of the city by the 
wide streets, lined with mountain ash shade trees, 
by whose roots water courses bubbled. Little 
brooks flowed down each side of the principal 
streets, keeping green in the heat of the summer 



A Far West City 21 

the park-like spaces between the walks and the 
roadway proper. 

Much good judgment and taste was evidenced 
in the platting of the city by its first settlers, and 
it is the more remarkable since the settlement was 
made in great privation and after a long overland 
journey. Somehow religious enthusiasm refines 
and exalts taste and gives an impulse to look well 
in one's appearances. 

The old time poverty of the first days was evi- 
denced by an occasional adobe house of small and 
mean build here and there amid edifices of the 
popular style, clapboarded, Venetian shuttered, 
and-wide-verandaed buildings of the days before 
the Civil War. 

I was in search of a newly-married couple to 
whose hospitality I bore letters of introduction. 
Dr. Welch and his bride, whose cherry-colored 
cheeks bespoke her youthfulness, were settled on 
Second South Street, near the city's center; and it 
was not long before I was seated at their table 
and enjoying their talk. The Doctor was a sol- 
dier of the late war and bore traces of the priva- 
tion and strain of that awful strife between 
brothers. 

Already the seeds of a fatal disease were at 
work, which within a few years were to cut him 
down in the prime of life. War is not alone 



22 Tenderfoot Days 

deadly at the cannon's mouth but it slays long 
after the fight. The roll is not complete that 
gives the long list of wounded and killed in a 
battle's campaigns, but in the tragedies of incom- 
plete lives, as in this case, where a young bride 
lost her love and hopes soon after marriage. We 
knew nothing of this coming shadow as we chat- 
ted of Utah's present condition and future pros- 
pects. 

While these young people were, in a sense, new- 
comers themselves, yet their experiences in this 
western territory amid Mormon surroundings af- 
forded me much good advice and direction for my 
own course of action. 

I had made up my mind not to antagonize 
everything that I did not approve. In this I de- 
parted somewhat from the course pursued by 
many recent visitors and writers from the days 
of Artemus Ward to the year of my own arrival 
in Salt Lake City. 

Of course Artemus Ward was a humorist, using 
incorrect spelling to throw the spell of fun over 
his readers; and I recalled his account of his ex- 
perience with Utah wives, as follows : — 

"'Cum and hev wives sealed to yu!' said a 
bunch of strappin' yung wimen tu me, wen I kim 
out of ther meetin' house. 'Kum and build up 
Zion in our midst. We welkum yu!' 



A Far West City 23 

" 'No yer don't!' sez I, a tearin' myself loos 
frum ther buksum arms. 'Nary a seal frum me!' 
and I fled the sene, gatherin' up my coat and hat, 
and left the city, which is inhabited by the most 
onprincipuled and dishonust pepul which I ever 
met' " 

Now this statement, with others printed in fun, 
and read wherever Artemus Ward's books were 
read, caused great wrath among the Mormons. 
They had to face many gross caricatures and mis- 
representations of their peculiar doctrines and 
practices, on the part of subsequent writers and 
visitors who too freely followed the example of 
the Yankee showman, Artemus Ward. 

Every ward of this city of the Saints had its 
meeting house. The sound and aroma of religion 
were more evident than those of education. To 
go to meeting was the acme of life and it was 
truly surprising to see with what zeal the crowd 
attended these meetings when nothing but the 
commonplace occurred. 

In those days and in that religious life there 
was no need of a fulsome and flaming advertise- 
ment to draw the crowd. Just the announcement, 
and like the flies settling on the kitchen back-door, 
the crowd came and settled in their seats to remain 
to the last. 

It all goes to show what suffering and sacrifice 



24 Tenderfoot Days 

for one's religious faith will do for the first ad- 
herents of a religion. Opposition to the follies 
of faith seems to strengthen those follies. We 
read that the "blood of the martyrs is the seed of 
the church," as in the times of the early Christian 
persecutions. 

I was soon seated in a packed row of people in 
the rear of one of the ward meeting houses. I 
was anxious to see these people at one of their 
everyday services. They seemed to the eye to be 
just like common people such as you meet in any 
church gathering. Plain, clean, simple and just 
ordinary bright folks. 

They evidently took their religion seriously and 
not as a social function. I imagine, as most of 
them were middle aged, that they felt all they had 
passed through to win a home and place for their 
faith. They evidently regarded the broad-built, 
and bearded men, on the platform, as inspired 
teachers, and listened to some very ordinary talk 
quite spell-bound. 

Of course there were some young people there; 
the vacant-eyed youth and the giggling girl who 
had only to glance at each other to see something 
funny in that simple fact. No religious meeting 
would be complete without that rear appendage 
of risible youthfulness ; and the huge joke of 
pinning John's pants pocket to Eliza's skirt 



A Far West City 25 

flounces. Such opportunities for rare and rich 
calf-love as a church meeting afforded, could not 
be overlooked even in such a serious gathering as 
a Mormon ward house meeting. 

An Apostle spoke at this gathering. He re- 
joiced in the common name of Smith, and yet it 
was almost a royal name in that locality. For 
was not Joseph Smith the Seer, Revelator and 
Leader of these Latter Day Saints? 

This apostle was a relative of the martyr of 
this church who fell the victim of a Missouri mob 
of fanatics, who did nothing more by their crime 
of murder than to feed the flame of a hated faith. 
He was a tall, bearded man. Here let me remark 
that almost all these men of leadership were 
apostolically bearded. It seems the part of all 
religious reformers or zealots to cultivate long 
hair, both on the head and the face. The razor- 
cleaned manly countenance of to-day was then a 
sign of infancy and lack of manhood. The hairy 
man was the popular man, and no thought was 
given to the lack of sanitation of mouth, nose, 
head, neck or collar in those days when "germs" 
were ignored. 

Apostle Smith was eloquent in the longwinded, 
adjectival way of speech. He certainly was well 
up in stock phrases and popular platitudes; and 
brought the handclap now and then like any po- 



26 Tenderfoot Days j 

litical ward speaker. Experiences, scripture, re- 
count of past persecutions, the claims of their 
faith and exhortations to live their religion con- 
stituted the subject matter of this address. 

They had the long prayer as well as the long 
speech. The Apostle Snow, a man of snowy head 
in keeping with his name, led this devotion. It 
reminded me of the long prayer of Pastor Wil- 
kins, in the days of my earliest youth, who prayed 
about forty minutes, with rousing shouts at times 
as if the Lord was inattentive to his words, while 
my little legs hung aching from a hard seat; 
forcibly kept still by a mother's hand placed on 
them during this solemnity of the church service. 

Another Apostle, Orson Hyde by name as I 
recall it, then spoke. We were in Zion and the 
headquarters was prolific of leaders, and many of 
the Apostolic twelve and a multitude of Patriarchs 
of the Church were always available for what was 
voluble. 

In this last speaker I beheld a typical Mormon 
as I had imagined him to be. He was heavy set 
and "bearded as the pard," rather coarse of 
feature and more carnal than spiritual in his gen- 
eral appearance. His heavy voice and dogmatic 
manner were in keeping with himself and his sub- 
ject, as he thundered denunciations of divine 
wrath on the Gentiles who were invading this re- 



A Far West City 27 

ligious city and bringing in their corruptions. He 
meant the mining camp morals of the adjacent 
canyons and gulches; and also the wicked eastern 
world which the Mormon had shaken off and 
which had persecuted him from city to city. It 
was the regular religious tirade which makes splen- 
did copy for the Speaker who talks in meeting to 
meeting-house people, and which invariably con- 
cluded the proceedings of these ward meetings. 

I took a stroll about the town. There were two 
good hotels. The Walker House, which was kept 
for the aliens who came to Zion. That is to say 
the miner, the millionaire, the tourist and the gam- 
bler. All were well-dressed men who gathered 
here and defensively spoke against Mormonism 
as though this atmosphere of religion was likely 
to rob them of their unbelief. It was rather funny 
to hear so many, whose religion was homeopathic 
indeed, talking so religiously. It was in the air 
then and shows how psychologically catching the 
religious idea is even when we do not like it. It 
spreads like measles and we have to have it be- 
fore we can get over it. I laughed at this ridicu- 
lous ridicule. Some of these Mormon-haters in- 
dulged in much of this kind of talk while discuss- 
ing topics of which they had such small experi- 
ence. 

The other hotel was the Townsend House, a 



28 Tenderfoot Days 

much more ancient structure and the gathering 
place of the Mormons and those of Mormon 
sympathies. Here the talk was of the past and 
the persecutions by the people of the States; and 
certain disloyal and seditious sayings were very 
common. The wounds of the past were not 
healed and the arm of authority, in the form of 
Camp Douglas, with its regiment of United 
States regulars, was a constant subject of heated 
speech. 

It was very evident that two sides were here, 
and no fence between them of sufficient width for 
a comfortable seat for the non-committal, easy- 
going man who wanted to be friendly with all and 
a foe to none. 

The new element, known as Gentile in the 
phraseology of this region, had its belligerent 
news-sheet, the Salt Lake Tribune. It had able 
men devoted to its sarcastic bitter gibes at the 
territory's majority of people. To offset this 
sheet the Mormon church had The Deseret News,. 
and it was just as ably edited and just as caustically 
worded as its opponent. It was a real treat in 
comparative hatred to read both these papers in 
one morning. 



CHAPTER III 

PILGRIMS TO A MODERN ZION 

"Far from the worldly crowds and strife, 
To a visioned city, they toiled their weary way, 
Seeking amid towering hills the sequestered life 
Of a peculiar people, a holy nation of the latter 
day." 

Bird 

JERUSALEM of old, the city of song, sacri- 
fices and tears, the city to which the Hebrew 
captives looked from their land of exile on the 
banks of the Euphrates, had its modern repeti- 
tion in this Zion of the Latter Day Saints settled 
and nestled in the tops of these Rocky Mountains. 
The topography of the country is singularly like 
that of the Holy Land of history, with the differ- 
ence that north is changed to south in its water 
system. 

It has its Dead Sea — the Great Salt Lake — 
at the north end of this valley and its divide, con- 
necting by a river — the Jordan — flowing out of it 
29 



30 Tenderfoot Days 

and receiving canyon streams on its way south, 
with the Sea of Galilee — Utah Lake — a fresh 
water sheet supplied from the springs in the Wa- 
satch Mountains. Of course there is no Tyre and 
Zidon, no Joppa and Mount Carmel overlooking 
the Sea, since this is an inland country far from 
the ocean. But here are fertile plains and warm 
valleys, watered by bubbling brooks; here is a 
land, under the touch of man's hand, that flows 
with milk and honey. 

No wonder then, that these religious enthu- 
siasts marshalled into a religious host by Joseph 
Smith, with captains like Brigham Young and 
Herber C. Kimball; such exhorters and teachers 
as Orson Pratt and Lorenzo Snow, full to the ex- 
tent of human capacity with "zeal not according 
to knowledge," should see in this region, secure 
by distance and the hills from persecutors, the 
Promised Land. 

It did not take very much imagination, so often 
found joined to enthusiasm, on the part of these 
saints of the Latter Day to see in themselves a 
modern Israel coming forth out of a modern 
Egypt — such as the slave-making states of Ten- 
nessee, Kentucky and Missouri — and, under a new 
Urim and Thummim vested in their priests and 
leaders, to make the desert pilgrimage into the 
land of promise and peace. 



Pilgrims to a Modern Zion 31 

Only a little warm exhortation, and it was 1 
never wanting, was needed to strengthen this 
fancy into fact. 

Originating in New York State, in Wayne 
County, the site of the memorable hill Cumorah, 
where Joseph Smith received his revelation by 
vision and found the historic plates of a past 
prophet — Mormon — and a defunct people — the 
Lamanites — this new faith and its following 
passed with the migratory spirit of the '40's to 
Nauvoo, Illinois, in the black prairie belt. Soon 
their peculiar faith made them obnoxious to their 
neighbors of narrow vision and bigoted belief, so 
out of their scarcely warmed nest they had to go 
yet farther west beyond the great river, the Mis- 
sissippi. They put down their stakes a third time 
in Missouri, a state just then settling with a mixed 
population from both the South and the North. 

Since these Mormons — for such they were now 
called by the general community — were "Come- 
Outers" and were separate from their neighbors, 
they became first unpopular, then obnoxious to 
those who differed from them. It must be re- 
membered that the '40's were the years of reli- 
gious divisions and debates. People loved to argue 
about shibboleths of religion, even to fighting out 
their differences. 

This fighting was of course generally verbal 



32 <_ Tenderfoot Days 

and ended in another new bisection of religion — 
some sect of a sect cut off from the parent body. 
The itinerant preachers who did much good in 
their rough way with a rough people amid rude 
surroundings, loved to verbally fight exponents of 
other shades of opinion. 

They found fine stuff for a fight in these "pesti- 
lent Mormons." More especially as this peculiar 
practice of polygamy set these new religionists on 
the hill of observation and criticism. Here was 
a fine chance to show up the enemy of orthodoxy, 
and all the sons of Boanerges — sons of thunder in 
the pulpit — fulminated at the Latter Day Saints. 

Soon this sort of preaching bore its expected 
fruit. Animosity and hatred were developed and 
this give and take often ended in blows at these 
debates and denunciations. 

We are not excusing the Mormon leaders or 
people. They were set in their ways and posed as 
martyrs of faith. Their undeniable zeal and sin- 
cerity won many a female convert from the homes 
of other faiths, and when such women became 
embosomed in the Mormon church and the polyg- 
amous consorts of some preacher, elder or 
bishop of this new faith, then the rancor reached 
its climax in riot. 

I do not go into the details of history on this 
subject. Books ad nauseam have been written 



Pilgrims to a Modern Zion > 33 

on the subject pro and con. The Mormon side 
has been voluminously voiced by good recorders 
and recounters, while the other side has met it 
with equal heat and greater volume. 

Truth is not entirely on either side and both 
sides made a sorry exhibition of the so-called re- 
ligion of peace and purity. We know the arrest 
of the two Smiths — Joseph and Hyrum — ended 
in the jail being besieged by an angry host of 
Missourians, who shot down the two brothers on 
the jail steps and thus ended their leadership of 
this new-born faith. 

Justice could not be had in such a day and place. 
Men and women were too intense and narrow of 
temper to give place to anything but prejudice. 
Out again the Mormons had to come from their 
settlements and homes, and then followed what 
the Dutch would call the "Great Trek." 

Brigham Young, a man of powerful frame and 
forceful mind, stepped into the shoes vacated by 
the dead Seer. With lieutenants of this same 
shrewd Yankee stock, for he was a Vermonter and 
they were mostly from down East states, he or- 
ganized these people into a marching brigade to 
cross the great American Desert to the Rocky 
Mountains, there to find a home for them all in 
a new promised land. 

In 1848, the first band set out, with ox wagons 






34 Tenderfoot Days 

and a few horses, to make the long journey that 
we now swiftly cover in forty-eight hours in a 
pullman. Innumerable creeks and sloughs to 
cross, after passing the great Missouri, never end- 
ing plains, like those of Kansas, Nebraska and 
Wyoming, constituted the highway of this host. 
The Indian, wild and in war paint, was abroad, 
for he had been greatly nettled and annoyed by 
the frontier hunter and trapper of those rough 
days, trespassing on his happy hunting grounds. 
The bison roamed in vast herds, and the prairie 
fires swept to the horizon through the long grass 
of these wild fields of pasture. 

But these men and women, of faith, girded up 
their loins and strapped on their guns, their all 
housed in the prairie schooner wagons under the 
hoops and canvas covers; with a "haw" and 
"gee," they started out with the spirit of adven- 
ture in their eyes and the zeal of their religion in 
their hearts. Oh! the wild ride that they made 
through these unknown wastes of land. They 
fought the Indians at the fords, the savage beasts 
at night, the fires in the fall when the herbage was 
dry as tinder; they suffered the sickness that ac- 
companied insufficient food and poor sanitation 
in camps, when they had to make long rests for 
their cattle to recoup. 

They had started too late in July for so long 



Pilgrims to a Modern Zion 35 

a journey, and recked not of the early winter of 
the mountains to which they journeyed. 

This has been the fault of most migrations, — 
a late start, — and insufficient knowledge of the 
length of the way. Oh! they were weary, more 
weary than the people of Israel in the desert of 
Sinai, who wearied of the length of the way as 
recounted in the Scripture. Israel had a Pres- 
ence in the cloud by day and in the fire by night, 
and thus they said to themselves, in that day, "If 
the Lord be for us, who can be against us?" An 
infallible guide did not call these Mormons to 
halt and make camp. 

Their leaders were known as prophets, priests 
and elders ; but they were fallible men, not guides 
familiar with the plains and the seasons. So win- 
ter caught them, weak from the long trek and 
want of food, cattle gaunt, or gone to dust on 
the road far back. 

Many lay down to die by the way, and many a 
little mound spoke of the children's resting place 
after the mother's arm had to give them up. Still 
their faith flowed on although their blood grew 
thin and their knees were feeble as they pushed 
forward. Through the canyons they passed into 
the valleys of the Rocky Mountains. 

Brigham Young with a few others pressed 
ahead looking for the place that he claimed he 



36 Tenderfoot Days 

had seen in vision and which was to be their 
destined home and the promised land of peace 
and plenty. 

This little scouting party came out of the moun- 
tains just above where the City of Salt Lake now 
stands. They stood upon the hill, — afterwards 
the site of Camp Douglas and the post of author- 
ity of Uncle Sam during territorial days, — and 
saw before them the Salt Sea, the valley widely 
stretching south, the river flowing to the limit of 
their vision through the divide which hid yet an- 
other and greater valley. 

"Here is the place that the Lord has chosen 
for this people!" 

It was Brigham Young's voice and the others 
bowed in assent as to the voice of a prophet. 

Thus they came to jtheir seat in the tops of the 
mountains, and from this center they spread out 
to occupy any ground that had water tributary to 
it, — for this was a land where irrigation was 
necessary. 

Other divisions of the Mormon host followed 
the next season; and soon this waste was peopled 
with a race fitted to endure hardships such as 
face all pioneers. 

The over-zeal of the leaders, however, a little 
later on led to a fatal mistake. The order went 
out to the rest of the waiting people on the banks 



Pilgrims to a Modern Zion 37 

of the Missouri, not to provide themselves with 
wagons and oxen, but to content themselves with 
two-wheeled push-carts in which they were to 
stow their goods; to come on thus in faith, and 
the Lord would provide. Fine sounding words 
to the faithful, but foolish council to the remnant 
of these people, eager for their earthly Zion. Of 
course they started and at first did well; but the 
length of the way was too much for the strength 
of the carts and those who pushed and pulled 
them. 

It is wonderful how this multitude of men, 
women and children got so far. They had walked 
to the canyons of the Rockies late in the fall 
season, — for it was slow work going this way by 
foot. Then the sudden cold caught them and the 
snows covered them. They fell down as they 
halted for the night and many were still down to 
stay, when the dim morning light pierced the fall- 
ing snow flakes. 

The others struggled on to drop as their fel- 
lows before them, the snow their winding sheet. 
A few hardy ones struggled through the drifted 
passes and like ghosts appeared in the city of the 
Saints with cries: — 

"They are dying! Come with food and help !" 

The relief went out with hope, but it was a hope 
not realized; only an expectation without fruitage. 



38 Tenderfoot Days 

They found the train of way-worn pilgrims but 
they had all passed on to another life. 

Faith has its triumphs, but also its tragedies. 
Faith can overcome mountains, but faith can fall 
in the climbing; like all other human things, faith 
has its failures. No matter what the directors of 
this push cart expedition believed possible in the 
interests of faith, no matter what the obedient 
host did in trying to obtain success through faith, 
the impossible blocked the way and this mighty 
pilgrimage of faith ended in a fiasco. 



CHAPTER IV 

CHURCH, STATE AND CAMP 

"He sees that this great roundabout, 
The world, with all its motley rout, 
Church, army, physic, law, 
Its customs and its businesses — " 

Cowper 

THE ecclesiastical is first in evidence in this 
modern city of the saints. This you would 
expect in view of its earlier history and because 
of its existence as a religious center. 

"Where is the Beehive?" I ask in the innocence 
of my tenderfoot knowledge. You see I had 
been told by some joker that the principal church 
building was so called because it was always 
crowded like a hive, when the bees are busy honey 
making. 

Certainly at the times of meeting, the Taber- 
nacle, for so the Mormons called the central place 
of worship in their accustomed Old Testament 
phraseology, was like a hive of bees, for it fairly 
39 



40 Tenderfoot Days 

swarmed with people. In those days, and in that 
place their was no dearth of attendants and few 
empty seats. There was nothing original or spec- 
tacular to draw the crowd beyond the names of 
the celebrated Mormon leaders. Their services 
were, in themselves, rather plain and common- 
place. 

I found my way, guided by the stream of com- 
mon looking people, to the entrance of the Taber- 
nacle. It was no tent or temporary structure like 
those reared by special collections to house evan- 
gelists on revival occasions. This was a solidly 
built structure and, because of its peculiar shape, 
was called by the outsider "the Soup Tureen." 

It did look like one on a very large scale, in- 
verted so the bottom was the top with the cover 
removed. On stubby pillars, with low walls, a 
huge oblong dome covered a generous space, mak- 
ing an immense interior under one roof. It was 
perfect in its acoustics. You could almost hear 
a pin drop if silence prevailed. 

An immense organ, erected at the end and lifted 
high up to near the roof, made the giant space 
resonant with musical sounds. A genius played 
it the day I was there. It throbbed and sobbed as 
though voicing the woes and throes through which 
these people had found their way to this moun- 
tain land of theirs. 



Church, State and Camp 41 

A choir as large as an ordinary church audience 
sang well during the occasions for song. The 
audience itself was worthy of the place and filled 
all its twelve thousand seats with a mixed multi- 
tude of men, women, and children. The last were 
decidedly visible and sometimes audible. There 
was no church finery in dress but, in place of the 
usual "go-to-meeting" garments, was the evident 
interest on the faces of almost every one present. 

There was just one phrase of scripture that 
came into my mind unsolicited as I looked at the 
long lines of faces directed one way. 

"All these have come out of great tribulation." 
Whatever their faith and its faults they had suf- 
fered for it, and having paid in tears a goodly 
price for what they had obtained, they seemed by 
their earnest gaze at the leaders who spoke to 
them to prize it seriously. 

The speaking was by many and from unique 
pulpits. Below the organ and choir, a large space 
was given over to tiers of seats in a wide semi- 
circular form. These were occupied by the Seventy 
and the Apostles of the church. 

This was no one-man pulpit. Furthermore each 
of these tiers of seats had its pulpit in the exact 
center of the tier; so from above down there 
were these pulpit-tribunes in line with each other 
and facing the center aisle of the Tabernacle. 



42 Tenderfoot Days 

The lower tier and pulpit was for the Apostles 
and the President or Revelator of the church. In 
this case it was Brigham Young. I heard several 
speak from these tribunes of different tiers. This 
speaking was interspersed with choir and congre- 
gational singing. That of the choir was excel- 
lent in voice and execution. That of the people 
was vociferous but commonplace. The speaking 
was of the same order as the singing, and was 
full of platitudes and rehearsals of the sufferings 
of these people at the hands of the outsider. 
There was 3 of course, some ground for what they 
said and the speakers made the most of it to a 
very sympathetic audience. 

But I came to see and hear Brigham Young, 
whose name to me was synonymous with Mor- 
monism. My wish was gratified, for this leader 
was present. He was a big man in head, face and 
frame. Full-bearded like most Mormon elders, 
he poised well as a leader, and looked at ease 
as he sat in the lower tier with the Apostles. He 
rose to speak at last and stepped into the pulpit- 
tribune of the apostolic tier, and his voice and 
diction were that of a master of assemblies. 

A fine presence and forceful speech riveted the 
attention of all, but the subject matter was a dis- 
appointment. Nothing out of the ordinary was 
uttered. He upbraided "his saints" like a Jere- 



Church, State and Camp 43 

miah or an Isaiah of the Jews, and yet he did not 
fail occasionally to insert a modicum of praise. 

"You are not too good! Not as good as you 
ought to be ! But you are better than the best that 
these Gentiles can produce!" Again and again 
he would say, "Copy not their ways, neither speak 
their words ; their oaths and foulness. Follow my 
advice and live your religion." 

It struck me on hearing all this parade of 
speech, in these long services, that the whole of 
Mormon church worship was a matter of "too 
much speaking." It was speech gone to seed. 
The flower, perfume and color, was fled as a sum- 
mertime past, and the husks of the harvest were 
only left. I had seen the very opposite of this 
in religious conventions, where speech was for- 
gotten in intonations, invocations and reverbera- 
tions of ceremonial pomp. So goes the pendulum 
or religious custom, from one extreme to another. 

They observed a very democratic communion 
service. Bread and water; for here the wine was 
turned to water. All were given these emblems 
of communion. Even the little children and 
babes drank out of the glasses, which were filled 
constantly from white stone pitchers, passed along 
by a band of ushers. We, too, who were "out- 
siders" and Gentiles were generously included in 
this religious repast. Of course the bread was 



44 Tenderfoot Days 

but a morsel and the water but a swallow, but 
there was no "fencing of tables," after the manner 
of those old Covenanters, who fought for their 
faith in troubled Scotland. 

With the final anthem and last words, the great 
audience swarmed out of this hive of humanity, 
like the bees after flowers. We went out after 
fresh air and relief. For I heard many a sound, 
like a sigh of satisfaction, when the service was 
over and outdoors was a possibility. The streets 
adjacent were like city sidewalks during show- 
time, as this great crowd went homeward. 

I saw another side of this city's life the next 
day. I was introduced by Dr. Welch to Governor 
Emery, who represented the Powers that Be at 
Washington, D. C, and not the powers that were 
in Mormondom. He and Judge Beatty were to- 
gether and I heard some words, in course of a 
brief interview, which showed that the Federal 
authorities were non-sympathetic, if not antagonis- 
tic, to the majority of the people of this country. 
Of course they were appointees of the president 
and depended not on this locality for their posi- 
tions. They evidently were like the Missourians 
of a previous generation, as they were in need of 
"being shown" whether any good thing could 
come out of such a thing as a modern Zion. They 
discounted the over-zeal of the Latter Day Saints, 



Church, State and Camp 45 

and doubted their loyalty to the Union; more 
especially as most Mormons voted the demo- 
cratic ticket, a ticket which to all good repub- 
licans of those reconstruction days, was almost the 
same as sympathy with secession. 

The bitterness of the Civil War was yet voiced 
in the talk of most of these civil servants, who 
could not forget the late strife. 

Utah had its Mormon legion which made Brig- 
ham Young and the Hierarchy of the church in- 
dependent of, if not opposed to, the Union. I 
found, and did not wonder much at it, that the 
representatives of the Federal Government all 
felt as though they were living in hostile ter- 
ritory. 

I heard Governor Emery speak at a meeting 
to promote higher education in the Territory. 
This was at the opening of a collegiate institution 
in Salt Lake City. What he said was well said, 
and so it ought to have been since he was a very 
long time in saying a very little. He spoke with 
a deliberation that was almost painful to one's 
patience, and with a caution that outdid any Scot 
I ever heard speak on a crisis : but he spoke with 
decision and most earnestly to the effect that a 
new order of intellectual teaching must be pushed 
in the Territory if it was to advance and be 
worthy of the future times. He said the war of 



46 Tenderfoot Days 

swords was over but the war of words had yet 
to be fought and settled, before true republican 
freedom could dominate the offices of the Terri- 
tory. He did not wave a bloody-shirt, as some of 
the political men of that day were wont to do, but 
he did point several times to the evidence of 
Uncle Sam's presence in the camp at Fort Douglas. 

That speech led me to make a visit to the Fort 
on the next day, where the regiment of blue 
soldiers were stationed. 

Down in the city I found a guardhouse and a 
sentry stationed there, who paced back and forth 
with rifle and fixed bayonet. He was a mere boy 
in the sky-blue uniform and forage cap of the days 
of the sixties. This guardhouse held a half dozen 
men in telegraphic communication with the Fort 
on the bench land, overlooking the city to the 
north. This guardhouse was well down in the city 
on First South Street, and in full view of the 
Amelia palace — Brigham Young's principal home 
— the Tithing House of Zion Co-operative Mer- 
cantile Institution, and the Tabernacle. 

There is no need to describe Camp Douglas; 
it was just like any ordinary military headquarters 
to be found in the West during this period. 
Parked artillery with frowning guns were pointed 
Zionward. There were such guns as they then 
had, but mere pop-guns in comparison with the 



Church, State and Camp 47 

modern scientific weapons of the twentieth cen- 
tury. Yet these guns over-awed Zion and were 
meant to do so. 

Seditious speech had been common on the 
streets of this mountain city a few years previous, 
when the people were restless under the newfelt 
pressure of the Federal and victorious Republic. 
Utah had come in line with Texas, California, 
Arizona and such outlying regions, which were so 
hard to reach because remote from the seat of 
government. Moreover many hostile Indians 
roamed between the middle settled West and the 
plains and mountains neighboring to Salt Lake 
City. In the days when the Mormons had their 
own militia it was not an uncommon remark, in 
everyday talk, to hear such words as these : 

"We can whip these U-nited States if they git 
too interferin'." 

So I was not surprised, when I chatted with 
the boys in blue, to hear one of them say, as he 
patted the black muzzle of a big gun: 

"Say, Doc, these little fellers are trained onto 
that old soup-tureen, you visited the other day." 
Said another: 

"Gosh! wot a hole for the daylight we could 
let into its roof." 

It never so happened that such extremities were 
necessary, but there were times when feeling and 



48 Tenderfoot Days 

faction ran very high. When a spark might have 
led to a blaze, which would have started a small 
internal war, much worse and more bloody than 
any Indian raid. 



CHAPTER V 

THE CO-OPERATIVE INDUSTRY OF UTAH 

"How doth the little busy hee 
Improve each shining hour, 
And gather honey all the day 
From every opening flower." 

Watts 

VERY suggestive of the Mormon view of in- 
dustry and business are the two symbols 
chosen to represent the co-operation of the peo- 
ple in making the desert into a garden, and that 
garden to bloom like a rose. I use that term as it 
was a favorite expression in those formative days 
by all the Mormon settlers with whom I talked 
about their business lives. 

For these people were a very practical people. 
They were enthusiasts in their religion, but never 
dreamers, monks, nuns, and transcendentalists like 
so many of the earliest enthusiasts of religious 
history. 

49 



50 Tenderfoot Days 

These symbols were two: a hive and an eye. 
The hive was a bee-hive of platted straw with 
conical top; and the eye was a single eye within 
a circular ring, wide open and viewing you as 
you regarded it. What did these symbols mean? 
The first meant the industry of the busy bee — 
making sweets out of the wild flowers and desert 
plants so that they became of commercial value. 

So the Saints were makers of values, through 
their industry, as they toiled on the land allotted 
to them, and watering it by furrows so that the 
desert should bring forth and bear a hundred 
fold. 

The second symbol meant that the eye of the 
Lord, which seeth single and true, was on them 
always as they worked ; and they must deal fairly 
one with the other, neither cheating nor defraud- 
ing their fellow man. This was where their re- 
ligion stepped in to keep straight their industry. 
For want of it now-a-days, business is much like 
the shark's life, existing to bite one another. 

You can imagine the effect of these ideas, voiced 
by the symbols on the front of every store in 
Mormondom. These suggestions of industry and 
probity are excellent and sufficient. Absorbed as 
they were in time by the subconscious mind of a 
generation of a people, the effect was a toiling 
busy crowd at work on the land, the foundation 



The Co-operative Industry of Utah 51 

of any and every commerce. Every man, woman 
and child was a worker, with no drones or bums 
allowed. 

Of course they raised produce, of course they 
needed warehouses, stores, and selling markets; 
and so arose the Institution which made business 
a unit, and was the first Trust formed in the 
Territories — Zion's Co-operative Mercantile In- 
stitution. 

The institution was Zion's and thus the probity 
suggested by the watchful eye of God was over 
all its transactions. In fact, we find these Latter 
Day Saints actually fulfilling, to their ability, the 
old-time cry of the Jewish prophet Micah — "Do 
justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy 
God." 

They made some bad breaks in this good order 
of life at times, as all do who are even of the best 
people, and we would be sour curmudgeons, in- 
deed, if we allowed a dislike for some of their 
teachings and some of their practices to blind us 
to the hearty effort, on their part, to be just in 
their business relations as well as good in their 
religious life. 

It certainly was a stroke of genius, when the 
idea of God being a witness to every business deal- 
ing was suggested by the "Onlooking Eye" ; asso- 
ciated with the "Honeykeeping Hive," on the 



52 Tenderfoot Days 

front of their places of business in city, town and 
hamlet, and even in the outlying country store. 

Of course being simply humans, they slipped a 
cog in this wheel of commerce. This great co- 
operative store, handling the business of all 
workers, tended to become a trust; to object to 
competition; to make arbitrary rules and penalties 
for those obnoxious to the managers and leaders. 

Where will you find men, who are fit for leaders, 
who do not soon boss, instead of simply directing, 
their employees and their customers? 

I knew many cases where men who were lax in 
their religion were punished by these business 
stores, in being "boycotted," so they could not sell 
their goods or buy the commodities they required. 

With all its faults this co-operation was a liv- 
ing business spine to carry business nerve and 
force to every section of the territory, and build 
up both its products and its trade. 

The main plant of this great business house was 
in Salt Lake City, but each town had its store, 
and at the stores everything could be sold that 
was produced in the country and was in a saleable 
condition, and everything from a needle to a steam 
engine could be bought if wanted. It could be 
paid for in money or in kind. 

At first it was all trade, like that of the early 
settler in the East and west of the Mississippi. 



The Co-operative Industry of Utah 53 

But industry breeds wealth and so it was not long 
before the sod houses gave way to clapboarded 
structures in the city, and to adobe houses — sun- 
baked brick — in the towns and countryside. 

It was a day of one price, and since there was 
but one business house, there was no opposition. 
That house representing the interests of the peo- 
ple and only charging a fair profit on the time 
and capital invested, was popular to the last de- 
gree. There was no effort nor desire to build up 
a millionaire institution or make a great fortune 
for any individual. 

Of course since there were some very shrewd 
Yankees among the leaders of the church, it fol- 
lows that they made the best of their opportuni- 
ties when trading through this mercantile house, 
and put things so that they personally profited by 
their inside knowledge of market prices. 

Still there was lacking the graft of modern busi- 
ness and the insane desire, bred by such men as 
Gould and his confreres of that day in the East, 
through their speculations, to smash financially 
every competitor in their own line of operations. 

It was before the days of millionaires and trusts 
but, even then, the shadows of these business 
evils were overhanging the land. 

This co-operative business house gave the church 
a chance to execute a little side business of its own. 



54 Tenderfoot Days 

Since it handled nearly all the products raised by 
the people, and since these people had obligated 
themselves to pay a tithe or tenth to the church, 
here was the chance to collect these dues in regular 
Old Testament fashion. 

Now the church of the Latter Day Saints is 
nothing if it is not obedient to the Old Testament. 
This we shall presently see when we consider its 
teachings and its theology. While a modern ex- 
pression of religion, yet that religion is stamped 
with the old patterns of Jewish days, and so the 
tithe or tenth part of one's income became the 
scale of giving, and so through these produce 
stores the church collected its tithes and filled its 
ecclesiastical coffers. 

Religion is nothing if it does not take up a col- 
lection. The old story is in point, that tells of a 
shipwrecked crew, afloat in the south seas, in the 
ship's long-boat. A pitiless sun and but few 
showers, with scant rations saved from the wreck, 
soon brought the hardened crew to a religious 
mellowness ; and some one urged a religious serv- 
ice to propitiate the Power of Heaven in their 
distress. As none could pray, and there was no 
preacher aboard the boat, and moreover their 
singing powers were limited to sailor shanties, for 
none remembered their childhood hymns; this re- 
ligious service consisted in taking up a collection 



The Co-operative Industry of Utah 55 

by passing the hat. No sailor failed to remember 
that function of a religious service, and since it 
was all they could do, they did that one thing. 
They felt better after this collection since they 
thought the Lord would look after — "Poor Jack," 
since he had looked after the interests of the 
Lord's church. 

I do not mean to say that this ideal church 
finance was always carried out. There are too 
many kickers in every kind of thing of human 
management. But a lot of tithing came to hand 
by way of the Co-op, as it was called for short, 
and many were the sneers of outsiders as they 
spoke of this "cinch" the church had on the in- 
dustry of the land. 

"Who wouldn't be a leader, and even a Mor- 
mon, with such fat pickings coming in from the 
fields?" 

Such resources were stable, and unlike the volun- 
tary offerings, which support the usual ecclesias- 
tical efforts of the denominations. So Zion could 
build stores, schools, ward houses and meeting 
places, until finally a temple was built that took 
forty years to finish. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE VALLEY SETTLEMENTS 

"The desert shall rejoice and blossom like a rose!' 

Bible 

A STRING of valleys, rich of soil, but scant 
of water, stretched from north to south in 
this territory from Salt Lake City to Saint Tjeorge. 

It was the policy of these people to occupy the 
land in settlements similar to those of the French 
Canadians. No doubt the idea was born of the 
observations, made in earlier days, by the Mor- 
mon leaders who were mostly from the New Eng- 
land States. They were probably visitors, at 
times, across the border from New Hampshire or 
Vermont, and so knew how the French habitant 
was housed in villages with their farms farther 
afield. To their labor they went forth in the 
morning, to return, at the call of the "Angelus," 
from their fields to their settlement-firesides at 
night. 

This made for social life, and suited well the 
56 



The Valley Settlements 57 

gregarious and garrulous genius of the French 
race stock that settled that eastern portion of the 
great Canadian Dominion. It did more. It gave 
the religious leader and teacher, the priest of the 
Roman Church, the power and opportunity to 
reach, by ready speech, the people whose easy 
assembling was possible, after work hours, since 
they were village residents. 

There were no solitary farmhouses, often out 
of sight of a neighbor, and so out of mind, touch 
and sympathy; such as we see on the wide plains 
of the Dakotas of the North- West; or could have 
seen, in those early days, on the prairies of Illinois 
or the woodlands of Indiana or Ohio. 

So these Utah settlers occupied town and ham- 
lets, and the meeting house, the center of its life, 
was always well filled by adjacent residents. By 
every water course, small or large, near or dis- 
tant, from the hills which supplied these rills, 
these settlements were formed. Each was fully 
organized and often incorporated, having mayor, 
council, wards; like any city. 

The lands adjacent were divided up among the 
people so that each family head, and those acting 
as heads of or for families, could have the pro- 
verbial forty acres and a mule, a sufficient start 
in life on the soil. How sensible, stable, and 
socialistic this was, is seen in the contentment and 



58 Tenderfoot Days 

progress of these settlers from the first days. 
Right speedily the ground tickled with the hoe, 
laughed with a harvest, everywhere that the lavish 
waters of the towering Wasatch or Orquirreh 
Ranges could be diverted. 

The silver streams of embryo wealth to a 
desert-land came, in torrents, down the rough 
granite studded canyons, to waste their life giv- 
ing power by falling into the Utah Jordan, and 
then rolling south into Utah Lake, the modern 
Sea of Galilee with towns around its watery 
shores. 

But industry harnessed these waters as the 
Eastern settlers did their mill-streams by dams, to 
make them commercially profitable and powerful. 
So the Mormon people by canals cut to suit the 
contour of the land brought water to every little 
patch of arable soil. The fair clime and genial 
sun of Utah, mountain-sheltered from the Borean 
blasts that swept the prairie wastes to the west, 
made farming both a delight and a success. 

I have never seen finer wheat than the sym- 
metrical, golden kernels of grain in the Utah 
Valley. And the yield was most generous when 
properly watered; forty and fifty bushels being 
common. What toothsome loaves the housewives 
made from this wheat, milled by Utah's Co- 
operative Institution. 



The Valley Settlements 59 

The fruit of these settlements was on a par with 
the grain. Peaches, especially, were finely-flavored 
and were generally raised. Almost every slop- 
ing shed-roof, in the season, was covered with cut 
peaches drying in the sun, for the market at home 
and abroad. In fact, these people, who knew the 
keen bite of poverty for the few first years, soon 
had all that the mouth and stomach asked for, in 
the way of varied foods. 

Cattle, too, well-fed, throve and helped the 
dairy to flourish, and the meat market to be well 
supplied. 

I think that you can see the character and ap- 
pearance of these settlements. The borders of 
each incorporated town touched those of the suc- 
ceeding one, as you travelled south, so in one 
sense you were never out of town. 

This applied to the good land districts above. 
Of course there was much benchland, sagebrush 
areas, for which water could not be procured, be- 
ing either too expensive to grade to the land in 
need, or there was not sufficient dependable water 
to be had to warrant the laying out of a settle- 
ment. So Utah still had its waste places, and the 
silences belonging to all waste places. 

These valley settlements began around the 
Great Salt Lake, the main city of the Saints being 
the principal one. They then spread generally 



60 Tenderfoot Days 

southward, over the divides separating these val- 
leys of the mountains and so continued to the limit 
of the territory where it slipped over the rim of a 
basin, to lower altitudes, in northern Arizona, at 
St. George. 

At this latter and remote settlement, there was 
a sanitarium of climate, whose soft mildness in 
winter made it a resort for those who could afford 
the expense of a long stage trip in search of a 
change of season and the restoration of broken 
health. 

I rode about the towns that fringed the shores 
of Utah Lake and as I looked at its waters, quiet 
now, and the next hour swept by the torrential 
winds that came out of Spanish Fork Canyon as 
though shot from a high-powered gigantic air- 
gun, I thought of the blue Sea of Galilee, and the 
tempestuous night passage by Christ and his dis- 
ciples. 

Down the long stretch from Payson, the town 
at the south end of this fresh water inland sea, 
to Nephi beneath the lofty crest and ancient snows 
of Mount Nebo, overlooking its quiet streets, one 
travels through little settlements of the types, 
which I have already described; occupied by a 
class of small farmers, all doing well, but not one 
of them rich. 

The territory of my day was a land of little- 



The Valley Settlements 61 

landers and small fortunes; the capitalist was 
nosing in, but he was a gentile, or a foreign in- 
vestor, who was after mines and commodities, and 
fought shy of farming and soil investments. 

Mount Nebo, whose height was unclimbed by 
any Utah prophet, was the dividing range that 
intervened between the settlements of San Pete 
Valley, filled with Scandinavian settlers, and the 
main valley by Parowan, down which the railroad 
of this modern age passes on its way from Salt 
Lake to Los Angeles. 

I left the railroad at a little south of Payson, 
and from thence all my travelling was by stage or 
canvas covered wagon, or on the broncho of that 
region. 

I found the people homely, happy in their way, 
self-satisfied as to their sainthood and church life, 
but quite unintellectual. I do not mean that they 
were more ignorant than the usual rural popula- 
tion of the West of that day; they had a lot of 
homely wisdom and quaint sayings, with the usual 
horse-trading cuteness and wit; but as to thinking 
for themselves they were not remarkable, for like 
many a church folk in many a clime, they left all 
their thinking for the professional thinkers and 
creed makers; and so like sheep, satisfied with 
their shepherds, they listened to the voice of their 
authorities and acquiesced in all their demands. 



62 Tenderfoot Days 

I have sat in many a cosy parlor, with the 
visitor's chair in evidence, and enjoyed the hos- 
pitality and good will of industrious house-wives. 
I saw very little evidence of married unhappiness, 
or of a pronounced polygamy. Of course it was 
there, and some of the homesteads gave ocular 
evidence of plural wifehood with separate doors 
and windows of section-made adobe houses visible 
from the roadside. 

The children were barefooted, browned, and 
healthy. They were wild-eyed and shy when ques- 
tioned by a stranger, but very little more so than 
those of any rural people who see but little of the 
outside bustling world of commerce. 

Surely these settlements, utilizing these broad 
acres, otherwise idle, were a better product, de- 
spite these peculiarities, than a waste of sage and 
sand given over to hordes of coyotes, the prowl- 
ing bear and wildcat. 






CHAPTER VII 

A LONG RIDE THROUGH UTAH VALLEY 

"It were a journey like the path to Heaven, 
To help you find them." 

Milton 

IT was the midsummer of 1876, when I was 
invited to take a long distance drive through 
these Mormon settlements, with a missionary. 

He was not a Mormon missionary, however, 
but a representative of an orthodox Protestant 
denomination; several such religious bodies were 
seeking a foothold for school and church in this 
territory. 

In a certain sense we were doing scout duty for 
a Mission Board in New York City. As Moses 
of old sent spies into the land on the other side of 
Jordan of Scripture, so this Board sent its repre- 
sentatives to spy out this Promised Land, not 
from Dan to Beersheba, but from Ogden to 
Mount Pleasant. 

We were almost boys in spirit, and not far 
63 



64 Tenderfoot Days 

removed in years, so this task appealed to us as 
a sort of adventure mixed with duty imposed. 

We did not go afoot but drove a one-horse 
wagonette having for its load two dozen school 
desks and seats for an incipient academy of ele- 
mentary grade. The hope for the educational 
up-lift of a miseducated Utah. 

This to some, in these now liberal days, may 
seem a bigoted endeavor and a youthful assump- 
tion of a capacity to instruct others; but it, never- 
theless, was the outcome of the wise and weighty 
council of older men who accepted our offer as 
adventurers in this Pioneer Mission in San Pete 
Valley. 

It was not then given us to see the long, hard 
grind of work and duty to establish this educa- 
tional plant, so we went cheerfully south, like 
sailors shipping for a distant port. 

The pull for one lone horse, of these seats for 
future scholars, to say nothing of a box of heavy 
books, was unfair when we came to see the sand- 
ridges in our way on the roads over the valley 
divides. It was get out and push behind while 
the horse panted in front. 

If we had been better horse-jockeys, we would 
have insisted on a team when we left the city; 
but our commercial and theoretical well-wishers 
and providers, in their scholarly incapacity as 



A Long Ride Through Utah Valley 6$ 

mountain travellers, insisted that one horse was 
ample. 

Well, we crawled along, and whiled away the 
time with some healthy and also some unhealthy 
discussions of religious questions in comparative 
theology. We were like most of the young men, 
quick to discuss deep problems, and rushed in with 
our logic on subjects where "Angels feared to 
tread." 

Both warmed in body from our cart-pushings, 
and in mind from our arguments, we passed the 
heat of the day and the divide of land, so that at 
the sunset we saw no longer the Salt Lake to the 
north, but the sea of fresh water to the south; 
Lake Utah colored by the last rays of light. 

My companion was a Mac, one of the numer- 
ous Macs, whose forebears came from Scotland, 
and he lived up to his clan as "Varra creetical" 
in discussions. Now it is very hard to overcome 
a Scot in argument and so I had the worst of it 
just then. My companion wore a thin smile of 
victory and conceit at his superior intellectual 
prowess, more especially as he prided himself on 
the possession, not only of a B.A. and B.D., but 
an M.A. degree, whereas I had not quite finished 
college life when I had to mix with the world. 

But I had rubbed edges with that world; had 
been tutored by city stock-brokers and had been 



66 Tenderfoot Days 

a photographer, when a man had to be not only 
an artist but a chemist, to ply his trade; all this 
before I received my teaching degree. So I had 
my companion when it came to business things, 
and pushed him hard to the wall over this "scrub 
horse" that he had been tricked into by a trader; 
and the awful load that his ignorance of teaming 
had put into the wagonette for so long a drive. 

Crossing a creek about twelve miles on our way, 
the strain was too much for the harness and 
"crack" went one of the tugs. 

Here I gave my chum a little verbal rub on the 
unwisdom of cheap harnesses. I rubbed it farther 
in during the hour we spent in mending the leather 
with old rope ; as I informed him that no Western 
man ever travelled far without a coil of buckskin 
to meet such disasters as had overtaken us. He 
learned a great deal about the sorrows of a ten- 
derfoot before he was through with the trip, and 
his harness, often repaired, resembled some of 
those rare bargains offered to the green-hand in 
junk stores. 

The point of the mountain, seen all day from 
our Salt Lake City start, ended our up-grade pull, 
and now down-grade we went to our first stopping 
place. We were high enough to overlook the 
Jordan river, flowing well within its banks; for 
this Utah Jordan never overflows them to swell 



A Long Ride Through Utah Valley 67 

its waters like its Palestinian brother-river. We 
could see the haze over the Great Lake north, 
and the forming film of vapor over the smaller 
lake south of us, where Lehi and American Fork, 
two Mormon settlements, showed up their dry 
streets and the green fields adjacent. 

"Well, Mac! do we camp when we reach the 
borders of that lake?" I asked, fully supposing 
that he wanted to do the correct thing and sleep 
under the sky. 

"We'll not need to camp. We will make Lehi 
soon, and there's a chance for a room for us, and 
a corral for the horse." 

"Any hotels in these towns?" I asked, for he 
had been this way before by road. 

"None: but I know a Mormon family. The 
elder will take in travellers, if he likes their looks, 
and they don't catch him too much unawares." 

We carried a camp outfit, but did not wish to 
trench on our supplies, if possible, so early in the 
journey. The tired horse, that had done wonders 
from any point of view, but was dubbed a lazy 
brute by Mac, pulled us slowly into the distant 
town, and along its adobe-lined streets. 

"That is a long-drawn-out one?" I said, point- 
ing to a low-built house of sun-dried brick, "five 
doors and five windows all in a line." 

"Yes," said Mac, "that is an indication of 



68 Tenderfoot Days 

plural marriage. Each door and window is in a 
separate section. The patriarch, who lives there, 
has five wives." 

At last we stopped before a house. Our tired 
horse sighed as though his heart would break with 
relief. But we were to face disappointment. 

"No room for travellers this night," said the 
elder when Mac accosted him. I saw by the 
man's eye that he disapproved of us and our 
errand, although he looked with pity on our tired 
horse. He pointed south. 

"You can make American Fork in three miles." 

It happened that we entered this new town in 
the right place for us, A rather larger adobe 
than usual, was lighted up and the owner agreed 
to shelter us for the night by our paying a good 
stiff fee. 

I gave the horse a good feed and rubbed him 
down before I went in to wash and eat. 

Our host was a hearty old man, and one of the 
early converts from Wales. He had prospered 
in lands and goods, and was loud in his praise of 
this practical religion. I cannot say much for his 
table manner; for he ate with dirty hands, and 
used them twice to break up lumps of sugar in 
the bowl. The table-ware was primitive, indeed, 
but the cloth was clean and the meal well cooked 
by his energetic daughter. 



A Long Ride Through Utah Valley 69 

"Sugar was a very scarce article in my early 
days here, and I don't like to see it wasted." 

He was a widower, but no polygamist. He was 
a sample of the earnest, but ignorant peasant 
class of the old world who had greatly improved 
their material welfare by this change of country 
and faith. 

Mac met a horse trader at the table, and I 
was highly entertained by their efforts to make a 
swap. The trader's animal was a little worse 
blown than Mac's, but after all he was not the 
easy mark that he was supposed to be, and he 
kept his horse. 

We pulled out the next morning somewhat re- 
freshed but hauling the same full load. We 
passed over dry creeks, sand ridges, and through 
the town of Battle Creek; the site of an early 
fight; through Provo, the county seat, to Spring- 
ville, the most progressive of all these valley 
settlements. 

A knife-edged lofty ridge, Mount Aspinwall, 
overlooked us all the way on the east, while the 
lake glittered in the sun, six miles distant on the 
west. Down the canyons of this range at times 
the winds swept with sudden blasts, and crossing 
the lake, churned its waters into a fury. The 
breezes were refreshing since they blew across the 
road and not along it. We saw many pretty spots 



70 Tenderfoot Days 

of green, such as fields of wheat, nearly ripe, al- 
falfa patches of emerald hue and thrifty peach 
and prune orchards. We carried off, from one 
farm a bale of alfalfa, and a generous sample of 
early fruit. 

Just one year later, I rode through this region 
on a long horseback journey, and all the green was 
gone although it was yet early summer. The 
locusts were in the land. They had come in such 
clouds as to darken the day, and with such hearty 
appetites that even the bark on the orchard trees 
was consumed before they left. Their hatching 
ground was in mountainous Idaho, on the north, 
and periodically they passed out, leaving destruc- 
tion in their track. Even a piece of green-straw 
matting hung on a fence to air and dry, went down 
their ready throats. 

While in Springville, we prospected for a site 
in the interests of a liberal school. We had been 
invited to do so by some of the local men of in- 
fluence. There was a desire for something new 
in this progressive town at that time, and it bore 
fruit three years later in a well built brick edifice 
for school and mission work. It was later known 
as the Hungerford Academy, under the auspices 
of the Presbyterian Mission Board. It was put 
in charge of George Washington Leonard, an ex- 
staff officer of the Union Army. 



A Long Ride Through Utah Valley 71 

Of course we conferred with the so-called lib- 
eral element. In most of these settlements there 
were to be found a number of disaffected people. 
Some were so because they had been treated 
domineeringly by the church authorities, who 
ruled the civic as well as the religious interests of 
these valley towns; others because they had 
changed their views, with their increase of knowl- 
edge of the world at large, due to their contact 
with the new and non-Mormon elements filtering 
in to the population of the territory; still others 
because of business interests which carried them 
outside of the commerce of the co-operative stores 
to deal with mining men and mining machinery. 

In the old hortatory days, when the Mormon 
preachers painted every gentile with a coat of 
black, they gave a false idea of the outside world, 
which these business men now found to be un- 
true, for the gentile was not as black as he had 
been painted. 

A natural reaction set in, and a friendliness for 
the new-comers sprang up, and we found a few 
men, but no women, who desired an established 
opposition to the dominant church; in order to 
check its power and to give a spice of life in the 
business world in place of the old-time autonomy 
and monotony. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THROUGH SPANISH FORK CANYON AND THISTLE 
VALLEY 

"Now let us sing, Long live the King, 

And Gilpin, long live he; 
And when he next doth ride abroad, 

May I be there to see!" 

Cowper 

NEXT day we pushed our slow way up 
Spanish Fork Canyon. Some faint tradi- 
tion of the early Spaniards, the conquistadores of 
the days of Iberian rule, having reached as far 
north as this section, riveted the name upon this 
great gap in the mountains. 

There is no doubt those hardy men almost 
demons in a way did dare the extreme both in 
perils and distance. Some of them may have 
gazed with their fierce eyes set in bearded bronzed 
faces upon these very hills and vales. 

They were too far afield for them to put more 
than the stamp of their name on this region, so 



Through Spanish Fork Canyon 73 

when the Mormons came, the Redmen, the Piutes 
and the Utes, were the sole possessors of the soil. 

It was an up-hill and rocky road with the heat 
of mid-day reflecting from the granite rocks lin- 
ing the canyon sides and producing much perspira- 
tion, both for drivers and their steed. 

Yet the evening drawing nigh, the characteristic 
wind-blast down, this rocky tube chilled us to the 
bone, a quick change from the noon's torrid heat. 

"I know of a good spring hereabouts," said 
Mac, "one of my liberal friends of Mount 
Pleasant comes this way at times, and always 
camps by it; and he told me to be sure to sample 
its waters." 

This was refreshing news to me, for our last 
drink had been from a muddied and shallow irri- 
gation ditch. Round point after point, we slowly 
toiled, still ascending and looking for this spring 
that never appeared. It was about two hours 
later that we caught the odor of rotten eggs, and 
knew that our spring was a sulphur and thera- 
peutic one. Our liberal friend had his joke on 
Mac, when the latter stood at this actively boil- 
ing spring, with no desire to drink. 

Yet at this writing a costly sanitarium occupies 
the ground, people come from afar to spend both 
time and money for their health at this evil-smell- 
ing spring. Pure water is a prize when difficult 



74 Tenderfoot Days 

to obtain, and at that particular moment having 
no foresight of the future business value of this 
sulphur spring, we would have exchanged it for a 
few gallons of the cold article. 

We pushed on with dry tongues, and toward 
evening we entered Thistle Valley, now alive with 
the coal industry and the overland railroad, but 
then a wild, remote, upland plain. 

Here we found water in a little rill oozing out 
of the rocks, clear and cold as a Kentucky spring. 

"Why not camp out here? Plenty of wood 
around for a fire. It will be dark soon!" 

"No. Not here. Let us push on," said Mac. 
"I know a valley rancher at no great distance. 
He is what is called a 'Jack' Mormon and favors 
our work for the liberals." 

I grumbled, for I had no great liking for Mac's 
"little" distances, as I remembered that his eye 
was lacking in accuracy when it came to his re- 
membering mileage by the road. 

On again we went making a long day of it. I 
expected the poor horse to strike, not for pay, but 
for shorter hours; but the good animal had more 
grit than his appearance suggested. The miles 
were Irish ones, if not Russian, such as make the 
Siberian Versts such a weary terror to the travel- 
ler. We passed curve after curve in the road; 
crossed land-draws without number, expecting 



Through Spanish Fork Canyon 75 

every moment to sight the rancher's roof. It re- 
alized a modern war-song: 

"It's a long, long way to Tipperary, 
It's a long way to go." 

It began to look as though Mac had been sold 
again as to this ranch house ; as he had been with 
reference to the sulphur spring which he had been 
urged to sample. 

We broke another tug, just by way of diversion 
and use of a little more time which we could not 
spare. I used the old rope again and, of course, 
being tired I had to say something about buck- 
skin, as an essential part of an "experienced" 
traveller's outfit, the same being lacking with 
us. 

The moon rose. Her silvery face shone above 
the hills before us and made the uneven road 
visible, but the chaparral on either hand looked 
all the blacker. My imagination began to work 
concerning the Indians, who were off the reserva- 
tion, trailing us in these dark places; or those 
white bandits, of worse blood, who often waylaid 
travellers at such an uphill disadvantage as was 
ours. 

We were nervously silent, but if a bear had 
crashed through the brush, a coyote had yowled, 
or an owl had hooted, we might have shouted 
from fright, expectant of an attack from Indians 



76 Tenderfoot Days 

or bandits. 

Just then a dog barked with a homelike sound, 
and before long we saw the outline of a corral 
fence lining the road; then a house loomed up all 
in the dark. 

We drew up at the bars across the road and 
holloed. The tired rancher, waked out of his 
first sleep, came down to us in no gracious mood; 
but who could blame him at that midnight hour? 

We were the victims of Mac's defective judg- 
ment of road distances. He had come this way 
once before, with a fast road-team downgrade, 
and had expected as rapid return upgrade with 
one horse and a heavy load. 

We squared this late call with our "Jack" Mor- 
mon host in the way which is usually acceptable 
to midnight landlords. We fed our horse and 
bedded him with straw, and then climbed to an 
empty loft under the house roof, pillowing our 
weary heads on hay. 

This Thistle Valley is known for its rich soil. 
The greasewood grows high and strongly, a sure 
evidence of the depth of earth. It was sparsely 
settled in that day. At one end there was an 
Indian Reserve: a section of the great Uintah 
Reservation for the Piute nation. 

We met a crowd of Indian horsemen the next 
morning. They were wild and saucy, mocking us 



Through Spanish Fork Canyon 77 

and our outfit and racing around, whooping just 
to scare our horse by their antics; but it was 
wasted effort. They did not know that our horse 
was a sedate Presbyterian charger, whose charg- 
ing days were long past. Our beast just looked 
at them in surprise, and plodded on. 

We grinned at these red-painted horsemen and 
cried "How!" in return to their "How!", and so 
passed on. 

It was right here that an emigrant tragedy 
occurred some twenty years earlier. The foot- 
hills slope often into the valley with a long finger 
of lower hills that finally sink to the level of the 
valley road. Behind this projection, a war party 
of these same Piutes or Utes lay in ambush for 
the overlanders to California. 

Two wagons, the prairie schooner kind, with 
covers like an ark, and loaded to the guards with 
everything for the household, came crawling along 
this upgrade. Too independent to travel with 
the majority, they had struck out by this shorter 
way to reach California by the road via Saint 
George and Arizona; thus avoiding the awful 
Nevada deserts. 

Unsuspecting and unprepared they here were 
attacked by the Indians, who made a dash from 
behind a low hill abutting the road. It ended 
in the usual way. After a sharp and gallant fight 



78 Tenderfoot Days 

the strong white men fell, and all were slain, even 
to the babies. Blood and scalps and burning 
wagons, yelling Indians and dying men made the 
spot memorable. 

We looked at the scene and could almost see it 
enacted again; one of many such bloody halts to 
the stream of gold seekers, where a family passed 
out of knowledge, and left but a rumor to satisfy 
the anxiety and long waiting of friends left be- 
hind. 

At last Thistle Valley opened into a larger one, 
the San Pete Valley, and from our high ground 
we could see, by the dark patches along the val- 
ley's sides, the sites of the various settlements in 
this remote region populated by Scandinavian con- 
verts to Mormonism. 

The telephone, the rural delivery, the automo- 
bile of this favored day have brought all this 
section into the hustle of the world, since that 
quiet day when I first looked upon this broad ex- 
panse of fertile land. The mountains, then so 
silent, now glow with the electric lights of great 
mining centers. The richest coal is found, and 
feeds the mountain freight engines of the railroad 
which, as the agent of modern commerce, has 
invaded and captured this region of riches. 

Our good old horse, and I was really getting 
proud of his grit despite his disreputable looks, 



Through Spanish Fork Canyon 79 

brought us late in the day to the Liberal Hall 
fronting the Main street of Mount Pleasant, a 
town of three thousand inhabitants. 

Here were the headquarters of the liberal ele- 
ment of the valley, and this also was our destina- 
tion. In this Hall was the school, in embryo, for 
which the seats had been brought from afar so 
toilsomely. I laughed when they had been 
arranged in the lecture room of the Hall, to see 
one after another, the men, Liberals and Mor- 
mons, sit in them to test their strength. They did 
it so boyishly and with much evident interest. 
These seats were then up-to-date, but by this time 
they are antiquated, and broken up for fuel. 



CHAPTER IX 

OPPOSITION TO THE LIBERAL SCHOOLS 

"The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to 
him, armed with his primer, against the soldier in 
full military array." 

Lord Brougham 

MOUNT PLEASANT, the town to which 
I conducted my reader in the previous 
chapter, was the scene of the first firm stand for 
liberal schools in the territory. This stand with 
the opposition to it was due to the advent of my 
companion Mac, who not in the best of health, 
came, under medical advice, in the spring of 1876, 
to the mountain altitudes and air of Utah Ter- 
ritory to recuperate after an arduous course of 
higher education. 

Though frail in body, his mind and spirit were 
sound and needed no tonic. In fact, he was full 
of grit in this respect, a primary condition of suc- 
cess in any line of endeavor in the Far West of 
that period. It is an uphill enterprise to estab- 
80 



Opposition to the Liberal Schools 81 

lish a new order of schools anywhere, for the 
conservatives invariably oppose new methods on 
the principle that the old are better. 

At that time the Mormon schools were very 
elementary, for they had been overshadowed by 
the religious teaching and zeal of a people who 
combined church and state, and who regarded 
advanced education as a door of infidelity. 

Making due allowance for the distractions of 
frontier life, and the strenuous claims of agri- 
culture in a new land on its people, it remains 
true that the mental nourishment given, as school- 
ing, to the children was very poor. 

Mac and those who backed him in far-off New 
York felt strongly in the matter of a better and 
American training for the children of this remote 
territory. Thus his health and his task joined to 
establish his interests in a territory so far distant 
from his home. 

Invited to Mount Pleasant, by certain men of 
liberal views, he found himself one March morn- 
ing stepping from the bi-weekly stage at the 
town's post-office, a stranger among a strange 
people. This was the first attempt, outside of Salt 
Lake City, to establish the cause of liberal edu- 
cation. 

At the beginning he did not have very intel- 
lectual associates. An intellectual man himself, 



82 Tenderfoot Days 

and a fine teacher, his best helpers were no orna- 
ments to education. His Mormon opponents soon 
dubbed two of Mac's closest attendants, "Right 
Bower," and "Left Bower." 

"Right Bower" was a peripatetic sewing- 
machine agent, who was zealous in the interests of 
the original Howe sewing-machine, of very heavy 
running gear, and which sold readily, at that time, 
for one hundred and ten dollars each. "Left 
Bower" was an old miner, down on his luck, with 
the illuminated face of a free-drinker, whose resi- 
dence in the valley was due to the marriage of his 
only daughter to a son of a zealous Mormon 
elder. 

It was these two men who created the first lib- 
eral sentiments among the "Jack" Mormon class 
of the people, an element rather weak in the 
faith, although not quite apostates. 

The Mormon elders were first amused at this 
effort to supplement their establishments, but as 
the school drew and grew, concern followed 
amusement and soon anger succeeded this con- 
cern. A vigorous call for aid was sent to Salt 
Lake. Brigham Young himself with two apostles 
came down to organize a crusade of words against 
this liberal movement. 

The little town was wrought up to fever heat, 
and after Brigham Young returned to his head- 



Opposition to the Liberal Schools 83 

quarters, Mac expected trouble. It came. One 
night he had just closed a meeting in the adobe 
hall which they occupied. There had been noisy- 
exits, and noisier calls outside. A crowd surged 
in front and filled the yard. They began throw- 
ing stones and adobe bricks from a pile of mate- 
rial close by, with cries of: 

"Run him out of town!" 

"Rock his building good and plenty!" 

"We want no Liberal here!" 

"Come out and clear out!" 

"Take him out, boys!" 
A rush was made for the door. It had been 
closed a few minutes before. It bent beneath 
the weight of many shoulders, and threatened to 
break. 

Mac had a Colt revolver which he carried by 
the advice of the officers at Fort Douglas. From 
a small side window his head and arm appeared 
suddenly. He ordered the crowd to step off from 
the property, and retire to the street. 

"If any one of you breaks down that door I 
shall feel at liberty to defend my property with 
this weapon." He pointed his revolver at them. 
Mac, while small of stature and somewhat frail 
of build, in that day, yet had the square jaw and 
prominent chin of the Scot. His grit had its 
effect, for while more stones and bricks were 



84 Tenderfoot Days 

thrown, no more rushes at the door took place. 

In fact in a few minutes the crowd withdrew 
with muttered threats. The Mayor of the town, 
who also was the bishop of that Stake of Zion 
had just come forward, and with a few words so 
quieted the people that they dispersed to their 
homes. 

I do not think they would have gone to such an 
extreme course as to imperil Mac's body, since 
the military camp at Fort Douglas one hundred 
and thirty miles north had a with-holding power 
on fanaticism. 

It was a well-executed effort to scare him off, 
and would have succeeded against a faint-hearted 
man. Mac went to his cot-bed that night as 
quietly as usual, but his gun was under his pillow. 
He might trust in the Lord but he kept his powder 
dry according to the code of Oliver Cromwell. 

We expected such demonstrations of opposition 
at the first opening of these new schools. I have 
personal knowledge of a school beginning at 
American Fork, a town near the canyon of that 
name, where the scenery is said to rival in gran- 
deur that of the Yosemite Valley. This town had 
a liberal element and a school was begun with 
a teacher in charge. 

"Why do you come here? You are not wanted," 
said the Bishop of that Stake of Zion. 



Opposition to the Liberal Schools 85 

"We come to teach the young people better 
manners and methods." 

"We can do all that now as we have done other 
things in the past. There is no need of you or 
your so-called work." 

"We are at liberty to do our work here, if law 
abiding, wherever the flag flies. The flag flies in 
this Territory now." 

This Bishop gave the quiet word to the town 
roughs to annoy the teacher and his school. A 
howling brigade was formed on the occasion of 
every night meeting, and hideous noises were 
made outside the door. Then followed a throw- 
ing brigade, and stones showered on the building. 
At the last part of the assault, several adobe 
bricks were hurled through the windows, breaking 
the sash as well as the glass, and striking the 
opposite wall of the room. The Bishop, being 
the Mayor of this incorporated town, did not heed 
the complaints made to him in his civic capacity, 
and the disturbers had full swing until they grew 
tired of this outrage themselves, and the suf- 
ferers were rewarded for their patience by a lull 
in the opposition. 

Meanwhile the Liberals were boycotted at 
the Co-op stores, and they had to send to Jew 
merchants in Salt Lake City for their supplies. 
It was nerve-racking, yet a combination of pa- 



86 Tenderfoot Days ' 

tience and courage wore out the first hot opposi- 
tion. Then followed an entrenched, stubborn 
action of the church elders which by personal 
visits and threats kept away most of the young 
people and older children for a time. 

While I was temporarily in charge of the 
Mount Pleasant school, during Mac's absence in 
the East, I came in contact with "Lo," the Ute 
Indian of the Territory, in all his blanket and 
gun glory. These Utes were a fine race of men 
physically. Beneath their brave exterior, of 
course, there was left, despite Mormon church 
teaching, much of the cruel temper of the Apaches 
or the Arapahoes. The Mormons made much of 
these Utes, for according to their theology the 
Redmen of North America are the descendants 
of the Lamanites, the original inhabitants of the 
land in the times of Mormon their prophet. For 
further particulars, see the book of Mormon. 

They had a way of calling these natives by a 
pet name, "The Battle Axes of the Lord," and 
used them, in harmony with that name, to do their 
disagreeable work, as I shall have to recount in 
a later chapter. 

I have always thought that the Bishop of 
Mount Pleasant sent this band of Battle-Axes to 
scare me off. I did not look so fierce of face as 
Mac, the organizer of the school. Late one 



Opposition to the Liberal Schools 87 

warm afternoon in June, the doors were ajar to 
catch all the air possible. I was in the front room 
of the house adjoining the school hall, and before 
I was aware of it, with a sudden tramp of feet, 
the kitchen to the rear of the house was filled with 
blanketed Utes. As I came in, an array of keen 
black eyes regarded me. They were squatted, 
Indian fashion, around the walls, each with his 
gun held well within his knees. A deep voiced 
demand followed. 

"Want meat! Want pie! Heap hungry!" 
How they knew that we had a batch of pies baked 
that day puzzled me at the moment, but I after- 
wards heard that the Bishop had told these strong 
allies of his, that I had a liking for the American 
national pie, and they would surely find some at 
my house. 

The speaker was really tall and straight, a 
fair copy of Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans;" 
but he was very lean and hungry looking. He 
had a crafty face, and his eyes were full just then 
of malice and insolence. 

Their attitude towards me was due to the fol- 
lowing fable, told to them by the Mormon elders. 

"The Mormon was the Indians' true friend and 
brother, while the American was the Redman's 
white-faced foe, who took away their land, and 
shot them when they resisted this robbery, using 



88 Tenderfoot Days 

the blue-coated soldier to do the deed." 

These Indians' ancestors, in earlier days, had 
come in fighting contact with the migratory and 
invading white man and much injustice, spoliation, 
and slaughter had followed that contact of fiery 
spirits of both sides, as the Redman sought to 
stop the emigrant invasion of his hunting grounds. 

I had been skillfully associated, by the Mor- 
mons, with the frontier white men whose com- 
mon saying was "The only good Injun is a dead 
Injun," and this accounted for the unfriendly 
looks of my Indian visitors. 

Now the kitchen larder was not very full. To 
supply with food a baker's dozen of strapping 
natives, was a problem. It was our policy to 
please rather than to offend these men, in an en- 
deavor to counteract base stones to our prejudice. 

It so happened that a big batch of dried-fruit 
pies had been cooked that very morning by a busy 
company of women who were interested in our 
Liberal Hall work. 

"No meat to-day; too many mouths," I said to 
the modern fac-simile of Cooper's Indian. 

"Go to the Bishop up the street, who has a big 
house; also many cooks. He can give you much 
meat to eat." 

The Indian's eyes glittered as I mentioned the 
Bishop. 



Opposition to the Liberal Schools 89 

It was the duty of the Church rulers, in accord- 
ance with their creed, to entertain strangers or 
travellers, white or red, and to make no charge 
for this hospitality. The Bishops especially 
prided themselves on keeping this ancient custom 
alive. I knew this and also did "Lo," the Indian. 

"You give pie. American pie heap good for 
Ute." 

"Do you eat white man's pie?" I asked, eyeing 
them all in turn. "I will see if there is enough to 
go around this circle." 

It had come to me that the batch of pies, now 
on the shelves of the little six by six pantry, would 
serve a better purpose in the tough stomachs of 
these Utes, than in those of visitors assembling 
that evening in the Social Hall. 

The eyes of all the Indians followed me into the 
pantry, and were on me when I came out with a 
dozen of the ladies' pie-provisions. I handed 
them to "Lo." With the rest in the pantry there 
was just enough to go around the circle, which in 
itself was fortunate, for it gave to every man a 
pie, and so all were on an equality. It was a 
sight to the eyes to look at such an Indian feast. 
They enjoyed those pies, and I enjoyed seeing 
them eat. 

The meal was soon over, for it does not take 
an Indian long to eat a pie. They were pleased 



90 Tenderfoot Days 

and amused at my good natured response to their 
demand. Said the leader: 

"Heap good man. Heap good pie." 

Then they stood up, and, with grins and more 
friendly eyes, they went out in Indian file, and I 
saw them no more. I never heard of their call 
on the Bishop. I was rather pleased at the out- 
come of this visit. 

I soon had visitors of another kind. A delega- 
tion of six women came rushing in. 

"What were those Indians after here?" they 
cried. 

"After pie." 

"What! our pies! You surely did not feed 
those lazy beggars our pies." 

"I did. They came demanding food with guns 
in their hands, thinking to scare me. To please 
them and gain their good will, and off-set the 
Mormon stories of American hate, I fed them 
your pies," 

"Oh! oh! oh! Our pies! What shall we do 
to-night?" 

"Bake some more now. Those in the stomachs 
of the Utes are heralds of peace for us. It de- 
pends on your cooking whether their repast will 
disturb their digestion." 

"No fear of that! An Indian's digestion is 
that of an ostrich." 



Opposition to the Liberal Schools 91 

Soon I was hustled out of the little kitchen, all 
too small for six active women. These women 
knew that at the social of the evening, some food 
distinctively American, would be in demand. 
They decided that a batch of New England pies 
would be ideal, so they re-doubled their morn- 
ing's efforts and doubled the pie out-put for that 
night's festivities. 



CHAPTER X 

BEHIND THE CURTAIN 

"Is this a dagger which I see before me, 
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me 
clutch thee." 

Shakespeare 

AFIELD fence in Utah often occasions a 
marked contrast in the appearance of the 
soil. On one side of it there is green alfalfa, 
peach and plum trees as thrifty as the best, due to 
the little rills of irrigation water. On the other 
side of the same fence there is nothing but the 
silt and sand of a pure desert, the habitat of sage 
brush and the horned-toad. 

The two sides of a shield are often quite dif- 
ferent; and there are two sides to Mormonism, 
as in most religions. I have shown you the fair 
and fertile looking side, but in order to be true 
to the facts, as I saw them, I must show you the 
other. 

I am not the critic or judge in this matter. The 
92 



Behind the Curtain 93 

reader can occupy that position, if he sd desires. 
Otherwise time and the great future must unite 
to be it, and will pronounce a true judgment. I 
am but a recounter of my own observances and 
experiences. 

First a few words about the Mormon Rurales, 
Rough Riders or Destroying Angels. These 
were the Danites, or Mormon military police, and 
their work was for both Church and State. 

These strangely gathered people were isolated, 
enthusiastic, then intolerant, and afterwards 
crafty and cruel in the administration of their 
public affairs. Many vile things have been said of 
the Mormons. I do not join in that abuse. 
Where so much smoke has arisen there must be 
some fire as the cause of it. 

We know that the Mormons, as an outgrowth 
of the persecutions they endured in the East, and 
as a defensive measure, organized a militia, called 
the Nauvoo Legion. It drilled openly and was 
perfected as an engine of war shortly before, and 
also during, the days of the Civil strife in the 
States. Those days saw interests, so paramount 
to an insignificant evidence of Mormon dis- 
loyalty, that amid the rush of events and the crash 
of war, no notice was taken of this Legion, or 
steps enforced to put it down. 

In the Utah of my experience, this Legion was 



94 Tenderfoot Days 

kept sub-rosa; yet remained intact as a military 
arm, of Mormon interests, and could be used at a 
moment's call. It had been the great reserve 
force of the Territory in the past and was the 
power behind the throne which enabled Brigham 
Young to execute his will in the days of the' 
5o's. In fact, the Mormon police or Rurales, 
popularly known as the "Danites" or the "Des- 
troying Angels" ; using the biblical phraseology so 
common among these people, were really the active 
and executive arm of this militia. 

Thus the Church had something more than 
moral force to give power to its mandates. It had 
a physical force, like any country armed to meet 
its foe, or put down rebellion within its own bor- 
ders. 

These were picked men in horsemanship, and 
the use of weapons. They were "Angels" of help 
to their own kind, but "Destroyers" of all opposi- 
tion. They had a picked leader in the person of 
Porter Rockwell, and an able second in Bill Hick- 
man, both men of that period, and the products 
of the open wild life of the far West. 

Porter Rockwell was a romantic person in ap- 
pearance. Well proportioned, with dark aquiline 
features, bright black eyes, and long curling hair, 
he was a brunette Custer in his style and charm of 
leadership. 



Behind the Curtain 95 

Probably his most important act was leading 
his band south in pursuit of the Missourian over- 
land party of emigrants, the especial objects of 
hate; since it was in Missouri that Joseph Smith 
and his brother had been slain by the mob. 

I had some facts given me by a little man, 
whose name was Little. He was indeed insig- 
nificant to look at, but a perfect wasp in the sting 
of his words when he was willing to talk about 
these things, "behind the curtain" as he called 
them. He had a small farm at a little town 
called Benjamin near the borders of Lake Utah; 
and was well acquainted with Rockwell and his 
band. What his former relationship to the 
Danites was I never could get him to tell, but he 
had inside knowledge of many dark deeds of those 
early days. 

"Old Brigham used to hunt down these apos- 
tates with Rockwell's men, like you'd hunt rabbits 
in the brush." 

"What did he do with them when he caught 
them?" 

"Sent 'em to hell across-lots. That's the way 
the old prophet talked of them as knew too much, 
and had dropped out the Church." 

"Well, what does that phrase really mean?" 

"Just this. You never saw those men alive 
again. They were caught slipping through the 



g6 Tenderfoot Days 

canyons, east or west, but they never got clean 
away. If any one asked for them it was said 
that 'the Injuns raised their hair.' " 

"You mean that they were killed and scalped?" 

"Yes. But they weren't killed by Injuns, 
though their scalps might hang at a Piute's belt." 

That was as near as I could get Little to say 
who killed them. You can reach your own con- 
clusions. 

The Mormons had a crude doctrine, which they 
derived from the Old Testament theology. 
Human blood might be shed when necessary. The 
red line is seen running through these Jewish writ- 
ings. The Mormons called this doctrine "Blood 
Atonement," and meant by it, that the shedding 
of a man's blood, though it destroyed his body, 
was the means of saving his soul from final 
apostasy. To the Latter Day Saint, who was 
initiated in all his religious ritual, it was the un- 
pardonable sin to forsake the Church of the 
Latter Days, once you had become a member. 

I tried to get Little to give me the names of 
these men who died, because they had dropped 
out of the Church, and also the dates and places 
of their deaths. He was mum. 

"See, I've had to' take a fearful oath to keep 
silent. I dare not tell. The Church, here, is a 
secret order, and has its penalties, which are 



Behind the Curtain 97 

carried out." 

"Well there is no fear of that now that Brig- 
ham is dead at last, is there?" 

He only shook his head. This conversation 
was in October, 1877, two months after the auto- 
crat of the Mormons had died in Salt Lake City. 

I met Bill Hickman when in Bingham Canyon 
at the mining camp. This was in 1875. Porter 
Rockwell was not living then, and Hickman had 
himself dropped out of action, although you 
could not say that he was an apostate. He was 
a stout-built, cynical-featured man, with an eye 
that glittered and said things; but his lips were 
silent as to the past. He was not put out of the 
way, because, as he himself said, "I know too 
much for them to do it." 

He was still an active man, although his hair 
was grey; but his mount of a horse was like that 
of a cowboy in the round up days, and you could 
see that his home was in the saddle. He dropped 
to his feet with the soft touch of a cat, and in his 
earlier years he must have been a hard man to 
handle in a fight. 

Both Rockwell and Hickman were at Mountain 
Meadows in '57, when the hundred and fifty Mis- 
sourians, on their way to California, were killed 
to the last man and child by the Indians (?). 

It would have been a great thing to have gained 






V 



98 Tenderfoot Days 

an account of that massacre from Hickman, but 
when asked, he only answered with a shrewd lift 
of his eyes. 

There was a man whom I knew, an old soldier 
of Uncle Sam, who was one of the first of the 
soldiers who came to the Territory prior to the 
Civil War when the Government thought it wise 
to have a military camp in the neighborhood of 
Salt Lake City. 

This man fell in love with a daughter of Utah, 
a buxom young woman, who beguiled him into 
joining the Mormon Church in order to marry 
her. He was never at heart a very loyal Mor- 
mon, and so was in a frame of mind to give im- 
partial testimony. 

John Bennet was of Scotch birth, and could 
never get away from the conscience for truth, 
which he had imbibed from the Old Kirk. 

I met him in American Fork, and found he 
knew a good deal of the past of the Danites, and 
was willing to talk. 

"Were you here in 1857, when the Missouri 
party went south?" 

"Yes, I saw them go through this town, a tired 
looking lot." 

"How did you treat them?" 

"None of us loved a Missourian. They had 
badly treated us fourteen years before and we had 



Behind the Curtain 99 

not forgotten. These emigrants were hard up 
and wanted to buy supplies from us. We wouldn't 
sell them a thing." 

"Didn't you do anything for them?" 

"Just a little. I had no personal reason to hate 
'em, so I gave, to a tall thin man with a big 
family, a sack of flour and a ham on the sly." 

"You say on the sly; was there a watch kept 
over them by the Mormons?" 

"Yes, and a close one. The order had gone out 
to let them feed themselves, if they could, and not 
to take their money for any food; so I had to be 
cautious. I felt pity for the sick wife of this man, 
she looked so worn, and had such hopeless eyes. 
I fancy she foresaw the fate awaiting them far- 
ther south." 

"Did they stop here?" 

"Yes, they camped a day, just outside the town, 
to rest their beasts, and fill their water casks from 
the lake three miles away. I talked to one man, 
who wanted a drink for his wagon-load of young 
ones. My house was not far away. I noticed 
his hat as he took the bucket I gave him. It had 
once been a fine felt hat and white. It was very 
dirty from use, but he wore it so it resembled a 
sugar-cone, with a string band around the bot- 
tom. It looked like those conical hats the Mexi- 
can greasers wear, only theirs are straw made and 



ioo Tenderfoot Days 

this one was fine felt." 

"Did you ever see him again?" 

"No, but I saw his hat; I'll tell you about it. 
After these people went on, a little rested, with 
water but no food from us, all was quiet for a day 
or two; then a band of the Danites rode into 
town, with Bill Hickman at the head of them. I 
didn't see Porter Rockwell, for I understood that 
he had gone ahead, with a select few, to keep 
close trail on the emigrants. 

"They kept pretty mum. They were all around 
and rode good horses, and seemed in a great 
haste; for they left in a few minutes, in a cloud 
of dust." 

"Did you see this band again soon?" 

"Yes,, in about ten days I suppose, they came 
back a weary looking lot; but this time they had 
something to say." 

"What was their report?" 

"That the Missourians were all killed by the 
Indians, who had caught them unawares and sick 
at Mountain Meadows, far to the south and 
every man, woman and child had been scalped." 

"How did they speak of this massacre?" 

"Well, they said, it served 'em right. They 
got their dues for what they did us years ago ! 
The Indians have saved us a lot of trouble." 

"Did the Danites show any signs of being in 



Behind the Curtain 101 

the fight?" 

"Yes, a few had wounds. They all had more 
weapons than they needed apiece. And one man, 
I am certain, wore that conical white felt hat 
that had been on the head of the tall, lean Mis- 
sourian whose family I watered at my place. I 
was curious and got near to him to ask about it, 
but he wouldn't talk. Yet I saw a bullet hole in 
that hat, that showed that its wearer had been in 
a fight, before it fell from the head of its first 
owner." 

The Battle Axes of the Lord, the Piutes were 
a good disguise for the Danites, and scape-goats 
for the blame of this massacre. There is little 
doubt, both Utes and Destroyers, were together 
in the deed. Doubtless they looked like a band 
of hostile Indians. In that far-away meadow, the 
grass was red with blood, shed to avenge an an- 
cient wrong, done by other Missourians, and in 
this was fulfilled, to the letter, the old Jewish cry 
of, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." 
The avengers of blood got the blood they sought 
after fifteen years of vengeful waiting. The 
mills of time grind slow, but they grind most 
surely their grist. 

The Piutes of the San Pete and Sevier valleys 
had the odium of this massacre in the eyes of the 
public for many a long day. There were those 



102 i Tenderfoot Days 

who knew enough to be dissatisfied with this stere- 
otyped explanation, and it took twenty years 
more for justice to bring the evil doers to its bar. 

It was in the spring of 1877 that one saw a 
satisfied expression on the face of every Gentile 
in the Territory. The United States Courts, af- 
ter years of examination and preparation of the 
case, at last had prosecuted to the full extent of 
the law the murderers of the emigrants of '57. 

The culprit was no Indian. He was a white 
man. It might have been Brigham Young him- 
self, since he was autocrat of both Church and 
State in those days. He skillfully evaded the 
blow, which he saw was inevitable, and it was 
allowed to fall upon the local Bishop, John Tf 
Lee. He was the responsible person, through 
whom, the authorities carried out their purposes 
in that locality. Although promises were made 
to him that he should be safe-guarded from gov- 
ernment prosecution, he was allowed to carry all 
of the responsibility to the last. 

Having been found guilty by the government, 
the higher-ups let him go, as a sacrifice, and he 
was "hanged by the neck until dead." 

Everywhere that I went I noted the dismay 
of the Mormon that the government could ferret 
out so old a misdeed. No effort of the Church 
could offset the chagrin of the people. 

% 11 Yl 



Behind the Curtain 103 

I suppose many other deeds, committed in the 
same high-handed and fanatical way, were trou- 
bling the leaders. They feared that they also 
might be brought to the bar of justice, and the 
guilty ones punished. There is no question that 
a good deal of killing took place between 1850 
and 1865 that was not due to accident, Indians, 
personal quarrels of a frontier population, but 
was the result of fanaticism. 

It went about arresting men and women, who 
were not staunch of faith, and was not content 
with putting them into prison on manufactured 
charges, but put them to death in a quiet way. 

But it was the spectacular and wholesale killing, 
together with the vengeful boastings of the 
Church, that called so much attention to the 
Mountain Meadow's crime and so brought the 
sword of Justice to smite in behalf of the law. 

As we study human nature and history, we find 
this strange mingling of good and evil in religion, 
the red and white line woven into one strand. It 
is hard indeed, as human beings, to be the judges 
of such people and their acts. They endeavored 
to do well and right, but they fell through the in- 
fluence of an over-zeal, which swept them away 
to folly and the spilling of blood in the name of 
the Lord. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE CREED THAT CAUSED THE DEED 

"So many gods, so many creeds! 
So many paths that wind and wind, 
When just the art of being kind 
Is all this sad world needs." 

Ella Wheeler Wilcox 

THE shot does not leave the gun unless there 
is a powder charge behind it. The things 
which I have noted before and behind the Cur- 
tain of Events in Utah, could not arise without a 
sufficient cause. 

That cause is found in the creed of the people 
who settled the Territory while yet a wilderness, 
the hunting ground of nomadic Indians. 

A history of world populations records the 
shedding of much human blood at the behest of 
creeds. It is the easy mistake of earnest faith to 
follow the path of intemperate zeal. Egypt, 
Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome, as nations, 
saw the priests of religion offering the blood of 
104 



The Creed that Caused the Deed 105 

human beings to the gods, on splendidly built 
altars. The same is true of the New World. 
Cortez and his men-at-arms, great shedders of 
human blood, beheld the Aztecs of Anahuac, an- 
cient Mexico, offering human sacrifices at the al- 
tars' steps; yet these Spaniards in the retreat of 
"Noche Triste," the Doleful Night, shed as much 
blood of the Aztecs as religion had done in a 
score of years; since that older Doleful Night, 
when Caiphas, the High Priest, spoke concern- 
ing Jesus of Nazareth, "It is expedient that one 
man die for the people." 

In every land and clime, human blood has been 
offered in religious sacrifice. In Jewish ancient 
days, in Classic days, in the days of Nero, in those 
of the Inquisition, in Auto-da-Fe's, on St. Bar- 
tholomew's Eve in Paris, at Smithfield fires in Lon- 
don, in Protestant and Catholic revenges, in Flor- 
ida and Louisiana, — on to the days of the Mis- 
souri mob-violence, when the two Mormon 
Smiths fell, the holocaust of blood for religion's 
sake was continuous, until the slaughter in the 
lonely wastes of Southern Utah showed the error 
of it all. 

To use a theologic term, the Mormon creed is 
Anthropomorphic. It teaches a materialized 
Deity with body, parts and passions as a man. 
Here we have the key to this creed of strangely 



106 Tenderfoot Days 

mixed theory and practice. I do not go into the 
matter of the credibility and genuineness of the 
Mormon books of belief. A war of words has 
raged since 1827, and there is no need of another 
syllable on the thread-bare subject. What I say 
here I have gathered from the printed sermons 
of such leaders as Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, 
Heber C. Kimball, Orson Hyde, and Lorenzo 
Snow; all discourses published by the press of the 
Mormon Church, between 1855 and i860, in Salt 
Lake City. In these discourses I found the doc- 
trines really preached to, and accepted by, the 
people. These rough, and often rude, pulpit 
teachings were subsequently 1 withdrawn by the 
Church authorities at Salt Lake, and at the time 
of my sojourn in Utah, it was difficult to purchase 
the volumes. However, a friend of mine in 
Provo, a county seat overlooking Lake Utah, 
loaned four of the volumes to me for examination, 
but would not sell them at any price, and after re- 
turning them I was unable to secure other copies. 
As I remember these sermons to the people, 
they seemed to teach that Adam was the only 
God of this world; and he was also the God of 
Jesus Christ. It was admitted that Christ had 
a previous era before appearing in this world, and 
that he is to have a future era of Millennial Tri- 
umph in Salt Lake City. This is affirmed with 



The Creed that Caused the Deed 107 

strength. 

There is a strong tinge of Millennialism and of 
modern Russellism in these teachings. But Christ 
is as God to Joseph Smith, and so this first prophet 
of the Faith called the Church he established 
"The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day 
Saints." Now follows the nut of all this. It is 
this. That Joseph Smith is the god of this gen- 
eration of men, and so the Latter Day Saint re- 
gards his assassination with the same feeling that 
orthodox Christians regard the crucifixion of 
Christ by the Jews. 

According to these sermons, Joseph Smith, 
when living in Wayne County, New York State, 
was visited by the angel Moroni, son of the 
prophet Mormon, who revealed to him the an- 
cient history of America. He showed him the 
written plates, whose hieroglyphics were inter- 
preted by the stones, called the Urim and Thum- 
mim. 

He learned that America was first peopled by 
Noah, and later by the family of Lehi, a rem- 
nant of the Jews who had escaped from captivity 
in the days of King Zedekiah. These came across 
to Chili, and then traveled north by the Pacific 
coast, and so became the progenitors of the Red- 
men. Eras of faith and apostasy followed to the 
year before Christ 500, when the prophet Mor- 



108 , Tenderfoot Days 

mon was slain, and these record plates were hid- 
den in the hill Cumorah in Wayne County, there 
to remain until time was ripe to reveal them to 
Joseph Smith by the visit of the angel Moroni. 

This angel further revealed that this book of 
Mormon was to be added to the scriptures of the 
Old and New Testament. The Faith, founded on 
the whole of these books, was to be preached until 
the Millennial Dawn of Christ's Triumph. This 
Triumph should be reached in the interior of 
North America, in the tops of the mountains. 
Moreover this Latter Day Faith was to be the 
recipient of everyday revelation from Heaven to 
its leaders. As an organization, it was to include 
all the ancient orders of priesthood. 

It had two kinds of priesthood: The Melchi- 
zedek, which included the Prophet, the First Pa- 
triarch, the Twelve Apostles, the Seventy Coun- 
cillors, and the whole body of the High Priests; 
and the Aaronic priesthood which included the 
Bishops, Lower order of priests, the Elders, Dea- 
cons, and Ward Teachers without number. 

When I was a resident of Utah, it was claimed 
that there were 7,234 religious offices in the 
Church, whose membership was then estimated at 
100,000 people. This creed claimed to possess 
the powers of revelation, inspiration, miracles, 
prophecy, visions, tongues, and healing gifts. All 



The Creed that Caused the Deed 109 

these were in active use, and all this was supposed 
to be resident in Salt Lake City in the Church, 
called the "Latter Day Saints." 

You can see at once how unlike any other new 
western city this one was. It was another Je- 
rusalem brought down to date. Welded to these 
strange doctrines and excessive claims, were the 
following very practical, and sensible teachings: — 

"We believe in being honest, virtuous, and up- 
right; in doing good to all men, and that an idle 
or lazy person cannot be a Christian nor have 
salvation." You see in this the powder that had 
explosive force enough to make a telling shot, 
with the multitude of half taught and visionary 
people found all over the world of to-day. 

There is no place here for the grafter, the 
boodler, the promoter, the liar, the bum and the 
tramp. In fact I did not find that type of hu- 
manity among the Mormons. I had to go into the 
gentile mining camps to come across that kind of 
human trash. If my reader wants a full, detailed 
account of this strange faith, let him read one 
of the many worthy and competent authors who 
go into this subject exhaustively, such as Burton, 
Robinson, Dickson and Stenhouse. 

Polygamy, so prominent, when I was in Utah, 
was really an afterthought of this faith, and came 
into prominence through Brigham Young, as a 



no Tenderfoot Days 

new revelation in 1857. 

The two Smiths, Joseph and Hyrum, the mar- 
tyrs to Missourian violence, did not proclaim po- 
lygamy or practice it, if their family descendants 
are to be credited. The Josephite branch of the 
Mormon Church repudiates the doctrine, and the 
practice to this day. 

So much in the Bible seems to condone if not 
permit polygamy from the days of Abraham, the 
father of the Jewish race, with his Hagar as 
well as Sarah for a wife; to the times of Jacob 
and his concubines with two sisters for wives. 
Then uxorious David and his still more wived son 
Solomon, whose glory so much bespoken was not 
seemingly dimmed by his harem of one thousand 
concubines. 

It is not to be wondered at, that a certain type 
of mankind should revive the polygamy of the 
ancient world, give it standing by claiming a reve- 
lation permitting it among the faithful, in order 
to build up Zion with a seed of true believers. 

It was not so difficult for a born leader and 
master of assemblies like Brigham Young to rivet 
this practice on a credulous people. He saw if he 
succeeded in getting a good many good people 
and leading men committed to this practice, that 
he had them bound tight in a bundle of life from 
which there was no escape and which would make 



The Creed that Caused the Deed in 

them stick together against all opposition. 

He saw how it would make the people singular, 
and keep them intact from the seductions of the 
world. He saw that it would prevent the social 
evil of great cities, and, as a matter of fact, Utah 
had no white slavers in those days. 

He knew the Moslem element was strong in 
many men, that a sensualistic God and carnal 
pleasures as a reward would win with such men, 
where the more spiritual and monastic teachings 
of historic Christianity failed. 

So with these factors at work, and the ap- 
parent sanction of Old Testament scripture, to 
give authority to a new revelation, Brigham 
Young, a genius for religious leadership, pro- 
claimed polygamy as a doctrine of the Latter Day 
Church. 

Yet polygamy has its horrors, and they were 
constantly out-cropping in domestic circles. 

I will relate a few instances that came under my 
eyes. 

While staying in American Fork, I met Profes- 
sor Orbs, of the town schools. This school cov- 
ered the educational ground from the elementary 
to the academic. It was all under one roof. The 
higher branches were but poorly attended. The 
young men and young women could not come 
regularly to the school, since their services were 



ii2 Tenderfoot Days 

more needed in the homes and the fields. Orbs 
was a scholar, and a graduate of old Bowdoin 
College. After the Civil War was over, he went 
west like many of the enterprising young men of 
that period. He was finally invited to teach in 
Utah Territory, and was offered a principalship 
by the Mormon church authorities. He was not 
then an announced convert, and his wife, to whom 
he had been married only a few years, made him 
promise solemnly never to become a Mormon. 
On his agreeing to this, his wife consented to go 
to the Territory. 

When I knew them, they had been in the Terri- 
tory some ten years, and Professor Orbs was rank- 
ing high among the Mormons as one of them. 
He had not kept faith with his wife, and she was 
full of fears about the future. They then had 
four children. 

Mrs. Orbs came to me one day in great mental 
distress. 

"My husband is really going into polygamy." 

The tears were in both eyes and voice. 

"He promised me years ago never to do it. 
Now the Church authorities have pursuaded him. 
He says it is a step up, and will better his finances. 
Oh! will you not go and see him; urge him to 
give up this thing?" 

"He is not sincere in thinking it his duty, is he?" 



The Creed that Caused the Deed 113 

"He says he is, but the girl he is going to take 
is but eighteen, and has been one of his scholars. 
She thinks it is a promotion to be a wife of a 
professor." 

I did all that I could to comfort the poor lady 
and promised to see her husband. I did this some 
days later. He was quite abrupt with me, and 
said: 

"I think that this is no matter of yours. Our 
Church believes in plural marriage. It is my 
own matter." 

I could see at a glance he was fully committed 
to grieve his wife. It was the old incentive. A 
new young wife was attractive to a middle-aged 
man. He was ready to put aside his promise, 
the society of his faithful wife, the children she 
had raised in their home. The rosy young girl, 
offered him by the Church, was irresistible to 
a mind coarsened by the Mormon inoculation. 

The next I knew of him was a new house he 
had built for the new wife, adjoining his family 
home. He left for Salt Lake City, and the En- 
dowment House, where he went through the rit- 
ual of taking another wife, and returned with her, 
and the Church's approval of living his religion. 

His wife was broken-hearted, and the condo- 
lences of other polygamous women did not give 
her any comfort, since she was not of Mormon 



ii4 Tenderfoot Days 

stock, and kept intact her old Eastern views of life. 

Eliza Snow came down with several of her 
associates. She was the great woman of this 
social horror. In public she spoke eloquently in 
its favor. Quoted the Old Testament times, and 
characters. She trotted out Abraham, Jacob, Da- 
vid and Solomon, all men approved of God she 
said, and whose polygamous children became the 
ancestors of Israel. 

"There is a higher exaltation for the women 
who aid in building up Zion; who do their zealous 
part to populate this territory for the Saints. 

"We must occupy the land. We must keep out 
the Gentiles. We must give him no place of rest 
for the sole of his foot. Women only fulfill their 
end when they bear many children. Children are 
the great asset of the Church. It is the prophecy 
of the scripture that 'in Zion the streets shall be 
full of boys and girls playing.' " 

Such teaching as this was given to, and received 
by, a great audience in every town on Eliza 
Snow's tour, in the interests of polygamy. I was 
surprised at the audiences she drew. 

My early opinion, that all women were opposed 
instinctively to this doctrinal horror, was upset 
when I heard these leaders, among the women of 
the territory, thus advocating polygamous mar- 
riages. They were women of good education and 
were apparently refined, both in their manner of 



The Creed that Caused the Deed 115 

speech and dress. 

I felt sure that if it had not been received so 
meekly, and willingly by the women of the 
Church, and if it had been stoutly and socially 
resisted by them as a body, that the practice of 
polygamy would never have existed in the Mor- 
mon Church. 

That Church would then have stood on the 
same basis for criticism as those other religious 
denominations of America, that meet with no 
overt opposition or persecution. By this doctrine 
it stands alone, singular, as an anachronism; as a 
reversion to the type of Old Testament days, and 
is unfit for a place in these later days of higher 
ideals for women. 

While I was in San Pete County, I called at the 
residence of the Bishop of Mount Pleasant. It 
was not a pleasant errand I was on. It was to 
make complaint of the hoodlumism of the youth, 
supposed to be under his control, in stone throw- 
ing at the hall where the Liberal school, and its 
meetings were held. 

The Bishop was not an imposing sight. There 
was nothing stately about him, nor did he wear 
anything like canonical robes, such as we asso- 
ciate with the historic bishop. He was in his shirt 
sleeves with slop pants and was carrying swill for 
his pigs. He was evidently an industrious man, a 



n6 Tenderfoot Days 

practical character. He had need to be. His 
house was wide and big in style, since his family 
was large. He had five wives and fifteen children, 
and there was, of course, a financial side to this 
establishment, which made the Bishop a rustler. 

While I talked, I stood before the front porch, 
which was a long, low screened affair, shadowing 
the whole front of the house. There were dark 
shadowy corners in it, but not sufficiently dark to 
hide the array of womankind seated along its 
length. Five women occupied as many chairs, all 
busy with their hands at woman's tasks. All, did 
I say? No, I must omit the fifth, the youngest 
looking, who had nothing to do but look about. 
She also was the best dressed. She evidently was 
the favorite wife of the Bishop. 

The oldest woman was grey, with eyes that had 
in them a look of shyness, as well as pain. What 
a history those eyes had seen in that household. 
She was the wife of the Bishop's youth, and by 
her age she must have seen something of the ear- 
lier history of the territory. 

The other three women were stout and healthy 
looking and graded in their ages from the first 
to the last wife; for no new wife, added to the 
Mormon household, is older than her predecessor 
on the polygamous list. This is so common, that 
it is of the nature of a rule. It is the way also 



The Creed that Caused the Deed 117 

of human nature, the way of the world, and may 
I say, the way of foolish womankind; for with- 
out woman's consent, this matrimonial horror 
could not exist in a land of laws and freedom. 

The wonder to me was the placidity of these 
wives. The situation was accepted. What Mos- 
lem ideas were growing up among the younger 
generation, as they advanced in years and became 
familiar with such a scene as I have described. 
They had to recognize, from their infancy almost, 
the many mothers of a Mormon home. There 
was no fear of racial suicide in these houses. 
Children were all around, playing in the dust, 
before their homes, or out on the squares or 
streets of the town, in fact visible everywhere. 

The advocates of polygamy claim that for 
health and growth they outdo the children of mo- 
nogamy, since they say that the mothers have 
more time and leisure to fulfill their maternity. 

It is a subject that has its physical and medical 
side, as well as its sociological one, but hardly fit 
for discussion in a popular book for all sorts of 
readers. I must say that I never saw healthier, 
sturdier young ones than the Utah children. 

Of course the splendid climate and the air of 
these valleys, sheltered from the chilly blasts of 
the eastern Rockies, with easy temperatures and 
generous sunlight, accounted for much of the 



n8 Tenderfoot Days 

rude health that I saw. 

Also the outdoor life and the frugal food, due 
to limited circumstances, together with the active 
labor in the gardens and the field, from early 
childhood, wrote health on the cheeks, put good 
blood into the arteries, and a firelight and snap 
into their eyes. Yet I also saw how this anoma- 
lous state of matrimony coarsened the speech and 
habits of young Utah, both girls as well as boys. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE PASSING PROPHET 

"Your Fathers, where are they? And the 
Prophets, do they live forever?" 

Bible 

THERE he goes ! The fraud ! The cheat ! ,s 
Ole Petersen, of Ephraim townsite, in the 
San Pete valley, added some vigorous oaths and 
gestures to these words. He was an angry man 
striding back and forth on the front porch of the 
only public hotel in the little town. 

I had gone to meet this tow-haired Scandina- 
vian in the month of June, 1877, with the inter- 
ests of the Liberal work at heart. He was one of 
a few, in that section, who was opposed to the 
backing of the Mormon Church. 

This valley was mainly settled by people from 
Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They had re- 
nounced the stately Lutheran Church of their coun- 
try, and had welcomed, with enthusiasm, this Lat- 
ter Day faith. It fed their fanaticism with prom- 
119 



120 Tenderfoot Days 

ises of forty acres of land, in each man's name, as 
a gift of a new, practical religion, now existing 
in free America. These people had come over 
to receive their new start in life. By their industry 
they had made homes for themselves in this broad 
valley. Everything of their own here, they owed 
to the church. Why should they not stick to it? 

Now what was the matter with Ole Petersen, 
that he should revile the head of that church, as 
he was passing through this town of Ephraim? 
He was an apostate of the most violent kind. 
He had reacted powerfully against the Church, 
which had brought him out, as a boy with his 
father's household, years before. He had cause 
for it, and that cause was concrete in the person 
of Brigham Young, who was just then in full view 
of this incensed son of the North Seas. 

He had lost his property, and that loss had 
caused his apostasy. All this was due to some 
fine real estate machinery on the part of Brigham 
Young's office. His titles were voided and he was 
now almost penniless. He had been too free of 
speech, for Ole Petersen was a tonguey man, and 
the Church had paid him up for his talk, by tak- 
ing away his estate. This was done through some 
such crooked financial trick, as happens nowadays 
in California, when an eastern tenderfoot is 
fleeced by a real estate broker, whose office is on 



The Passing Prophet 121 

the curb of the street. 

Of course Ole Petersen laid all of his troubles 
and losses to the autocrat of Utah's finances, Brig- 
ham Young. And now this prophet was passing 
by. He was taking his last ride from St. George, 
in southern Utah, where he had wintered, and 
was on his return to headquarters in Salt Lake 
City. 

Brigham had been sick. The strokes of time 
began to tell on his giant frame ; and to face the 
winter in the low altitudes of St. George, below 
the rim of the basin and near the border of Ari- 
zona's canyons, was deemed the best for him. 
But a man of affairs must attend to his affairs. 
Certain events of late, like the successful prose- 
cution of John T. Lee for the Mountain Meadows 
affair, and the odium that the hanging of this cul- 
prit had brought on the Church, made it necessary 
for the ailing prophet to get back to his seat in 
Salt Lake City. So as soon as his strength would 
permit, he started on a stage ride of two hundred 
miles to the terminus of the railway, some hun- 
dred and ten miles south of the city. It was a 
ride through an almost hostile territory, since 
through this end of the country the dead Bishop 
had a host of relatives and friends, who were 
angry and incensed at the coup the government 
had made. 



122 Tenderfoot Days 

Lee's own family were out with threats to shoot 
the head of the Church, and, while Ole Petersen 
was no relative, he was hot in sympathy with 
these threats. 

This was Brigham Young's last outing, though 
he did not know it. He was not to fall from the 
shot of some vengeful Mormon, but from the 
stroke of disease. Dysentery carried him from 
the sight of man the following August. 

I had seen him two years before robust, though 
aged. I caught a glimpse of him as he was now 
passing by. He went fully armed and protected 
like some European monarch in danger of assault 
from disaffected subjects. 

A cloud of dust announced the coming of the 
cavalcade. He had left Manti, the county seat, 
which like St. George was a temple city. In these 
temple cities the rites of polygamy could be given 
as well as in Salt Lake City itself. In this man- 
ner the means of entering into polygamy was 
brought to men's doors and the long ride and ex- 
pense of a journey to Salt Lake was avoided. 

Brigham had a great many friends in this valley 
who took pains to protect him from Lee's two 
sons, who were out to shoot. 

"Here he comes ! Here he comes !" Such cries 
brought me out on the hotel porch, with Ole 
Petersen. 



The Passing Prophet 123 

I had been talking with him, but found him a 
restless listener. He was really listening for the 
cries to herald the passing prophet. He fidgeted 
and fretted. He was short and sharp in his an- 
swers, and impatient in his manner. He ran his 
hands through his hair, and pulled his long flaxen 
beard again and again. 

"That d — d cheat is coming through here to- 
day. I'd like to take a shot at him." 

"What has he done to you that makes you wish 
to shoot him?" 

I will tell his story in a few words. His parents 
had died soon after settling near Ephraim and 
they had left other property than the ranch they 
had received from the Church. His people had 
means to invest, when they first came over from 
Sweden. Being a minor the Church had taken 
charge of this property until he should come of 
age. As soon as he had grown up, the Church 
ordered him on a mission to Sweden to make con- 
verts of his fellow countrymen. He knew what 
this meant, since a Mormon missionary was sent 
forth at his own charges and had to make his own 
way and provide for his own expenses. 

It was a very hardy and wonderful experience 
that the Mormon missionary had to face, if sent 
on a mission. Nothing but the hottest faith and 
zeal could meet the need. Now Ole Petersen had 



124 Tenderfoot Days 

cooled off from the faith of his people. He had 
seen some things since childhood that he did not 
like, and there were many things he could not be- 
lieve. He had been born with a brain that wanted 
to think out things, and not take them for granted 
just because they were spoken with authority. 

So he refused the mission, and decided to stay 
and work his property himself. This did not suit 
the Church, which had long used his property, 
and did not intend to surrender the control of it. 

He was disciplined for his disobedience, and it 
was declared that he had forfeited his rights, and 
the Church further claimed that the investments 
made by the parents had proven failures, so there 
was very little due him. 

This little he was given. He was mad all 
through, and left the Church's jurisdiction; and 
was counted an apostate to whom the Church 
owed nothing. He interviewed Brigham Young, 
who had been very rough with him. He had gone 
away in a hot-headed rage, and. his little home 
being in this fanatical town of Ephraim, he had 
had a fighting time with words and blows. 

Yet he had the old Viking spirit, which kept 
him on the field. He had not sold out, and left 
for other parts, but stood his ground. He was 
trying to get a Liberal school into this seat of 
Mormonism. That was how I happened to meet 



The Passing Prophet 125 

him that hot day in June. 

If all this had occurred ten years earlier, Ole 
Petersen would have been "sent to hell across 
lots," like many others who had fought the 
Church of their early faith. 

"Here he comes! Here he comes!" 

These repeated cries brought Ole out into the 
dusty road, as the trotting cavalcade came up the 
street. 

Thirty Piute warriors in paint, feathers, and 
blankets, rode first with their guns across their 
saddles. These "Battle Axes" of the Lord had 
watchful eyes for any movements that looked like 
action. Ole eyed them as fiercely as they eyed 
him, and the others in the crowd. 

Next came a four horse covered carriage, with 
an armed rider on each side of the vehicle. 
Within, and yet in view, sunk back in the rear seat, 
with a tired air of a sick man, sat the Prophet. 
I caught a full view of his grim, grey bearded 
face, sicklied over by long illness, with a sallow 
tint so unlike the rugged hue that I had noticed in 
the Tabernacle two years before. He looked an- 
noyed as he leaned slightly forward, when he 
caught the sound of Ole Petersen's strident voice. 

"Oh! you Cheat! Oh! Church Fraud! You 
coward to forsake your tools! You are the man 
that they should have hung instead of Lee!" 



126 Tenderfoot Days 

Ole Petersen's arms were in the air, but without 
weapons; and this lanky, angry man shook his 
fist at Brigham, as he rapidly drove past. A mo- 
tion with a weapon, and there would have been a 
hail of bullets about us. 

The last I saw of Brigham Young was the tight- 
ening of the mouth until it was a thin, firm slit 
within a grey bearded face, that you see in the 
characteristic pictures of this Mormon leader. 
His hands clenched the seat as the carriage 
swayed; and I had looked my last at the passing 
prophet. He looked the sick man that he was. 

"May you die the death! May God strike you 
down!" This was Ole's parting shot as the car- 
riage, and its advance riders, swept on. As events 
showed, these words were more deadly than any 
shot that he might have fired. 

Thirty white guards followed close in the rear, 
garbed like cowboys and armed. These men 
grinned at us, and some few of them sneered at 
the angry Swede, vociferant in the roadway. Then 
the dust rose up, and hid them all from sight. 

I never thought that Ole's imprecation would be 
so soon fulfilled. I could see death in the eye of 
this aged despot, and so expected his passing from 
the world would not be long delayed. But hardly 
two months elapsed when word came south that 
the President of the Church of the Latter Day 



The Passing Prophet 127 

Saints had left for the bourne from whence no 
traveler returns. 

There are some ancient faiths that proclaim 
their saneness of life and creed, through the suc- 
ceeding ages and changes. But all such become 
inert, and if seemingly quick with life, it is but a 
galvanized vitality like the movements of a dead 
toad under the electric spark applied to a limb. 

See how intact China, the oldest of all coun- 
tries, has remained after the first discoveries and 
civilization. It would not change. It would not 
learn. So with Buddhism. It was content to med- 
itate and forego action. It held its ground for 
ages by the force of some fine, if not beautiful, 
ideas, but where it lives to-day it is a quiescent 
faith, its force lost to any dominance of the world. 

Mormonism has truth elements within its 
bosom, and because of this, it will live and thrive ; 
but unless it sloughs off the anachronisms and su- 
perstitions, it will be weighted with a corpse that 
will hold it to a body of death which will retard 
its power. But it has a practical element welded 
to its theories, and this may cause it to change with 
the times, and keep up with those times as they 
change. 

A heavy step in the entry, and a sharp knock on 
the door, of the Liberal Hall, in Mount Pleasant, 
and I opened to admit Ole Petersen, an excited 



128 Tenderfoot Days 

and delighted man. 

"You've heard the news? That Rascal's gone 
to his account. My curse came true!" 

There were many who felt like Ole Petersen, 
but a great mourning was made throughout the 
territory, as this modern Prophet passed from 
among his people. 

I soon got word from superficial observers of 
the conditions in Utah, that now the Master Mind 
was gone and his voice silent, the Church, which 
he had built up, would crumble and break. This 
was the general idea, just then, but it was a false 
one. 

This singular mixture of the practical and the 
spiritual, withstood a change of leaders with about 
the same ease that a kingdom meets the cry of, 
"The King is dead! Long live the King!" 

The old order of things went on under a new 
management. The system was well fitted to meet 
greater changes than a death could bring, and 
even to face a new condition, and prosper in a 
new environment, if necessary. 




. • 









m'iW'i- 



; .: " < r ^M: :; : 






CHAPTER XIII 

THE MIXED MULTITUDE 

"The Many-headed Multitude." 

Shakespeare 

IT was to avoid the so-called mixed multitude 
that the Latter Day Saints sought an isola- 
tion for themselves, and their posterity from the 
every-day world. 

In this they were the followers of the ancient 
people of Israel, when they left the flesh-pots of 
Egypt, by a most memorable desert march, and 
sought the promised land. Canaan was, indeed, 
such a land. Flowing with milk and honey — sup- 
plied with cattle and bees — it was a land of olive 
orchards and vineyards, watered by the early and 
later rains, and well fitted to be a sample to these 
modern wanderers, in their search for a desired 
habitation. 

I have shown how they found their heart's de- 
sire in the secluded mountain valleys of Utah, 
how also they sought to keep off intrusion, and 
129 



130 Tenderfoot Days 

to protect themselves from schism and apostasy. 
I have shown the logical outgrowth of their creed. 
It was pride in their peculiar customs and confi- 
dence in their religion, which nerved them for all 
this strenuous endeavor through forty years of 
patient, persevering, and conquering industry. 

Now they deserve their meed of praise for this 
activity of mind and body, for changing a waste 
into a garden, and in place of Indian tribes, 
peopling the land with a civilized population. 
They have done a good turn for the United 
States, for while their religious policies have made 
them often disloyal and antagonistic to Federal 
Law; they have opened to commerce an immensely 
rich region of soil and minerals, which would have 
remained quiescent for fifty years longer. 

I have tried to be fair and just to these people, 
and while noting their errors of reason and ac- 
tion, I have also noted their good intentions and 
their hardihood, in all their history, as far as I 
have had occasion to touch upon it. 

For long years none but the wandering, curious 
hunters and trappers travelled these Utah valleys, 
save the Indian tribes native to the region. The 
Mormon Church had no fear of friction with such 
elements. 

It was the "mixed multitude" they feared, and 
for as long as possible they kept it at a distance. 



The Mixed Multitude 131 

At last there filtered out of these mountains, car- 
ried by Dame Rumor, stories of mineral wealth, 
of gold and silver deposits in the hills; stories like 
those coming from California in the '50's, which 
set on fire such a tremendous enthusiasm for the 
Pacific Slope. 

Men stubbing their toes in climbing the foot- 
hills after straying stock, had cast up nuggets 
from the very "grass roots." Others, bending 
over purling streams to quench their desert thirst, 
had found "color" in their drinking cups. They 
had stooped over to wash their clothes in moun- 
tain creeks and remained to wash for gold in the 
same vessels in which they rinsed their dirty gar- 
ments. 

Of course the usual exaggeration of these acts 
gave a sort of Arabian Nights version to these 
things, and they came to the eastern world with 
all the charm of an Aladdin's Lamp. Then the 
multitude stirred, and woke up. It cast covetous 
eyes toward the hills which hid the Mormon 
people from the world. Wealthy men "grub- 
staked" hard up adventurers, and sent them out 
as spies of wealth. They came, saw, and reported 
that "the half had not been told." 

This started a rush of capital and labor, 
through the canyons by wagon road, and after- 
wards by the Union Pacific Railroad. Miners, 



132 Tenderfoot Days 

laborers, gamblers, storekeepers, cowboys, for- 
eigners, Jews and Gentiles, one and all hastened 
into these mountain solitudes which existed 
through the policy of the Mormon Church un- 
touched by the hand of Commerce. 

Men of wealth, as usual, engineered the mass. 
The era of the millionaire was at hand, but these 
millions that came were from abroad at first, for 
the United States was still over taxed, and stag- 
gering commercially from the effect of four years 
of war. British, French, and Italian money was 
flung recklessly into the hills, to be sunk in am- 
bitious mining camps, and stamp mills, under the 
superintendence of men who had no interest in the 
capital but their salary. 

You can imagine the change from the quiet, 
pastoral, and religious color of the past days to 
the hurry, hustle, and vociferous business of a 
new frontier life. 

The Jew came in, as he always does, on the 
crest of this wave of commerce. He seems built 
for trade, and being both a genius at opening trade 
centers, and a daring commercial gambler, he was 
in Salt Lake City, and in every new camp of this 
"mixed multitude" with his wares and ways. He 
was too shrewd to enter purely Mormon towns 
and so confront the great "Co-op." He wasted 
no time on such ventures, but industriously sold 



The Mixed Multitude 133 

his goods at three hundred percent profit to the 
reckless crowd, whose taste for gold was ready to 
pay any price for tools, goods, and food. 

One son of Israel, I knew, a good kind fellow 
he was too, who came into this business boiling 
pot, with just a pack, and before I left the Terri- 
tory, he was living in a palace in the city of the 
Saints. From "Pack to Palace," in five years, 
was "goin' some," as the miners say. 

Now everybody could not do that, but every- 
body thought he could. So you see the vim in- 
troduced by the "mixed multitude," and the utter 
impossibility of stemming such a tide. The Mor- 
mon authorities simply gasped at the crowd, made 
one futile effort to offset it with defunct laws of 
the defunct state of Deseret. But they gave it up, 
and grimly accepted the influx of new people, with 
their new ideas. 

At first this new tide of human life and industry 
ran along by itself, very much as the muddy Mis- 
souri does where its waters first enter the clearer 
stream of the Mississippi. But you know the 
universal rule. A little mud can cloud a whole 
body of water, and while the Missouri loses itself 
in the waters of the greater river, yet it is the hue 
of the Missouri that gives color to the Mississippi 
at New Orleans. 

So with the "mixed multitude" and the Mor- 



134 Tenderfoot Days , 

mons. Soon these newcomers inoculated the Ter- 
ritory with their more modern notions of life, 
and the two adverse streams, religious fanaticism 
on the one hand, and the commercial greed for 
gold on the other, ran a race side by side for a 
decade; and then intermingled as one life in camp, 
civic centers, and throughout the countryside; and 
thus the isolation of the Latter Day Saint was 
over. 

So Utah, when I first saw it in 1875, was under- 
going this change. The Missouri current of the 
"mixed multitude" was giving quite a decided 
color to the Mormonism of the past. 

I saw a few signs of the old heroic days, but 
wherever I went the stamp of the coming age 
was evident, in the looser, freer speech, the less 
respect, if not ridicule, given religion, and the at- 
mosphere of hard materialism common to the 
American frontier life. 

The watchword in these regions, for a long 
time, had been "Duty;" now it was to be "Dol- 
lars." Loss and gain set over against one an- 
other, as in most of the circles of this riddle we 
call life. 

The old settler, with his strong faith, gazed 
sourly at this condition of things, and as sourly 
proclaimed the coming wrath of God; but the 
newcomer of the "mixed multitude" smoked his 



The Mixed Multitude 135 

black cigar, stuck in the corner of his mouth, and 
answered with a grin of derision, and a drive of 
energy, that made the new order hum with the 
engines of machinery. 

Bingham Canyon sprang into life. It was a 
great gash in the Oquirreh Mountains, facing the 
salt sea on the one side, and the Utah Valley on 
the other. It was a mineral fissure that drew the 
crowd of "those who knew." It was not a high 
grade camp, as those days valued mining camps, 
where no ore was worked that did not yield forty 
dollars to the ton; but it was a big camp, in that 
there was no end to the veins, and the pockets 
that were beneath its apparent sterile surface. 

It was small then, with a population of four 
thousand people, when I first put foot in the camp 
one cold November day. It is now a mining city 
that issues every year many millions in dividends 
to its lucky stockholders. 

Alta City, in the Little Cottonwood Canyon, 
on the opposite side of the valley, in the Wah- 
satch range, and still higher up in the air than 
Bingham, with its altitude of ten thousand feet, 
was a richer camp, and the site of the celebrated 
Emma mine. This mine was sold for three mil- 
lion dollars to British capitalists, but was found 
afterwards to be a fraud, it having been "salted" 
with "color" by the promoters to deceive the 



136 Tenderfoot Days 

purchasers. 

An amphitheater of hills, gave Alta City a 
notable site. Dumps and tunnel exits could be 
seen all around, and out of this circle of industry, 
wealth poured and was carried down to market 
by a miniature railway, with an average grade of 
three hundred feet to the mile. 

Nothing was withheld in the lavish outlay of 
foreign money, that was making this a lively camp. 
While it is true many became rich, it is equally 
true that great hosts were made poor. This is 
about the outcome of all mining and fulfills the 
words of Mark Twain, who was himself an old 
miner as well as an author — "As much goes into 
the hole as comes out of it." 

Park City was another outcome of this min- 
ing fever. Situated in Big Cottonwood Canyon, 
and nearer Salt Lake City, it was conducted by 
a set of level-headed men who prevented any col- 
lapse to the camp, as finally overtook Alta City. 
The result was that while no furor was made over 
its location, yet it always produced stable wealth. 
Here it was that George Hearst, then a miner of 
experience in California, bought out a claim from 
a few discouraged tenderfoot adventurers. They 
had come within a few feet of great wealth, when 
they threw down their picks and said, "we quit." 
George Hearst began the next day, and a few 



The Mixed Multitude 137 

hours later was confronted with a vision of future 
wealth. 

He began his spectacular career, as a son of 
fortune, at this time, and began building up his 
remarkable success at the spot where others, more 
faint hearted than he, gave up the fight. 

Out of this mine came the means by which he 
became Senator of the United States, as no man 
at that time could become a Senator unless he had 
a long, a very long pocket book. The state uni- 
versity at Berkeley, California, and all the inter- 
ests of the Hearst's Syndicate of American News- 
papers, from the Pacific to the Atlantic, are under 
obligation to this mine in the Big Cottonwood 
Canyon. 

Of course there were flat failures in some of the 
camps. One such was at Tintic, where, at first, 
great surface showings drew the rush, but it was 
a case of "pinch out" for the camp, as it so often 
is with a promising vein of ore in a shaft, or a 
tunnel. It ends in a pocket, and a pocket holds 
just so much, and no more. So Tintic, as a camp, 
lies idle, dormant, dead. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE OLD PROSPECTOR 

"Riches certainly make themselves wings." 

Proverbs 

THE prospector is the man that makes mining 
possible. It is his enterprise, his everlasting 
faith in prospects, his nerve and calm courage, that 
does the trick. He casts a charm about lone grey- 
hills whose land value is about "two bits" per 
square mile, the price of a California miner's 
drink. He rambles in the chaparral, sage brush; 
and is familiar with the owl's hoot, the coyote's 
howl, and the rattler's hiss. But he enjoys his 
tin can repast, over a stick fire, amid such scenes; 
since he lives expectant that a stumble of his foot 
may unearth rich rock, that will give rise to a 
camp to be known by his name as the discoverer. 
Red Dick was such a man. I met him on the 
slope of the Little Cottonwood Canyon one hot 
afternoon in July. In midsummer the granite 
walls of this canyon absorb the sun's rays, and 
138 



The Old Prospector 139 

the flinty rocks reflect this heat from side to side. 
The bed of the canyon is at furnace heat during 
mid-day, only cooling with the evening breeze. 

Red Dick was wiping the sweat from a very 
rubicund face with an old red kerchief, which he 
wore loose about his lean red neck: the red flannel 
shirt tucked into his old pants accentuated his color 
characteristics, and the afternoon's heat. He was 
spitting and swearing, when I came up to him, on 
the trail to Alta City. His bottle was broken, for 
a slip from his hand just as he lifted it, had let 
it fall on a sharp flint at his feet. I saw disap- 
pointment on the face of a thirsty and bibulous 
man. It was not water he had lost, but the fa- 
vorite old rye whiskey in common use, and this 
gave greater volubility to his strong words. 
Strong waters always beget words under the 
stress of excitement. 

"Say, Stranger, this is tough luck! Lost my 
drink just at the lip!" 

He eyed me anxiously, with the evident hope 
that I had something stimulating hidden in my 
pocket. Well, I had. It was not whiskey for I 
cannot drink the stuff. I wonder that so many 
men like its flavour. But I like wine, for my an- 
cestors all drank it at meals, and I had been ac- 
customed to its use, in that way, from the days of 
my youth. I always thought of wine, beer, or 



140 Tenderfoot Days 

ale as a beverage to be used as one uses milk, tea, 
coffee, or water to quench thirst agreeably. 

It was not a temperance age or locality, and a 
strong drink was something everybody took, or 
expected to take on a suitable occasion. What I 
had was a flask of wine, some old Port, as a cor- 
dial for the body when overtaxed or chilled. 

"Here is something as good as what you have 
lost," I handed my flask to him, with a smile. He 
eyed it and myself, and grinned in a friendly way. 
Next he tilted it to his dry mouth, and shut his 
eyes while its contents gurgled down his long red 
throat, his Adam's apple working , vigorously. 
He was a gentleman, he knew when to stop. He 
took a good drink as he knew I wished him to, 
but he left me half the contents, wiped the flask 
with his sleeve, and handed it back. 

"Good stuff if it is wine ! It hit the right spot 
at this pertickeler time." 

I saw that he was a character, and was a prom- 
ising find for a good story, so I set out to inter- 
view him, like a reporter. 

As to outfit, he was evidently down to bedrock. 
A miner in luck is well, though roughly dressed. 
This man had no coat, a very dirty shirt and hat; 
while his overalls were held up by one lone sus- 
pender. His boots, of course, were well down 
at the heel, and almost open at the toes. Held by 



The Old Prospector 141 

a thin rope across his chest, his bundle of blankets 
hung under his arm. They were as well worn as 
his clothes. He had tobacco and a pipe, for these 
implements of the solitary came into sight straight- 
way after the drink, and he filled up and asked for 
a match. Soon the smoke was on, and I saw that 
he was ready for a yarn, and so at it I went. 

"Yes, I'm down, but I'm not out, pardner! 
You can see that without my saying it. I've been 
down many a time, but never quite out. Some day 
I'll finish in luck or out of it; for this life is a 
strange deal to some of us. Say! I've known the 
day when I wore good clothes like yours. I got 
a bit of an education to start with, so I knew some- 
thing about chemicals and assay work. Yes ! I'm 
an old Californian, and just missed being a forty- 
niner. I was on the American River back of Sac- 
ramento, in the early days, and panned out a heap 
of gold dirt in those placer diggin's. Yes ! I 
struck it rich there, but lost most of my pile when 
I visited Frisco with a bunch of the boys. But I 
had a good time, you bet! 

"No ! never thought, in those days, of settling 
down, or going into business. You see! those 
times were pretty free, and the dust came easy 
from the sands and rocks. We thought it would 
never let up, but just go on that way; so what was 
the use of saving the dust? Well! once I did buy 



142 Tenderfoot Days 

a place. A poor fellow had made a farm out of 
some flat bottom land on the Yuba River near 
Marysville. He wanted to go East to see his 
folks, as he was on his last legs, being a one- 
lunger. I had coin then, and he hit me in a soft 
spot I have at times. So I bought him out. You 
never saw a feller so glad as this poor guy, when 
he had my wad. 

"Well! I had a ranch on my hands, and a 
mighty fine vineyard too. I had stock and tools ; 
a house and barn. In fact the whole outfit was 
there. The boys plagued me to marry a widow 
who had five kids of her own. She kept a feeding 
house in Marysville, and the boys said it was a 
duty I owed society to hitch up with her. Well ! I 
didn't do it. I wasn't a marrying sort in those 
days. I might have done it once back where I 
came from. I ain't going to say where that was. 
That's all closed, — final. But she was cattish, 
and turned me down in a pet. So I felt very sore, 
and I ain't got over it yet. 

"My ranch was a bother to me, for I didn't 
know a thing about farming. I like roving, and 
this thing called for settling down. What d'ye 
think settled it? The Yuba River! 

"There came a flood such as you don't often 
see. The whole Sacramento Valley looked like a 
lake for weeks, and my ranch was washed clean 



The Old Prospector 143 

off the earth by the time the water went down. 
You never saw such rain, about like it was when 
Noah went into the ark. Of course my ground 
showed up after the freshit, but there wasn't a 
thing on it, but mud and rocks, with some stranded 
logs and timber. House, vineyard, crops, stock 
all gone. So I let it slide, since the Yuba River 
had changed its course, and ran partly over my 
land. 

"I wasn't pertickler sorry for I itched to get at 
a pick again. So the old life went on. Flush one 
year and busted the next. Went with the rush 
to every new diggin's, till I got the rhumaticks 
bad and had to quit for a time. 

"Well ! I set up a sort of resort at Stockton, 
which I bought with some coin I had left. I fed 
the travellers on the road to the mines. I liquored 
them at a bar, and let them gamble in my back 
room. You bet I was popular. This sort of 
thing did for a while, till a town fire burned out 
the whole side of the street, and my outfit went 
up in smoke. 

"No insurance? Of course not. We weren't 
that careful in those days. Bedrock again. 
Then I joined a band of rangers to run out the 
cattle thieves, and greaser bandits, which were 
playing hob with the valley folks. In one hot 
scrimmage I got a ball in the thigh that stopped 



144 Tenderfoot Days 

horse riding for good, and brought back my old 
rhumatiks. 

"I was in a hospital in Frisco for about five 
months, with one thing and another. The Doc 
treated me fine, but shot an awful lot of stuff into 
my stummick in that length of time. 

"I came out thin as a lath, but full of go. I 
went mining again, this time in quartz rock, on 
the Mother Lode, at Sonora town. It was shaft 
sinking, and I worked for pay, not for prospects. 
I kept right poor, for it always took the whole 
of my wages to live. D'ye notice that's the way 
with a salary man, he can't save a bean, for the 
life of him? 

"Think of old age? No, never crossed my 
mind once 'til one day in a barber shop I saw 
I was gettin' grey and bald. You see I come of 
a stock that frosts early at top. 

"Then came the Colorado rush, and it carried 
me right off my feet so to speak. A mining rush 
always took with me. I joined a party of sur- 
veyors, and we put through the desert for Denver. 
If I was a writer I could fill a book with stuff 
about that trip. I tell you we saw some awful 
things; but to go on with this truthful yarn, pard- 
ner, I prospected at Fairplay and Cripple Creek. 
But, Lord! it wasn't like the old diggin's on the 
Feather and Yuba Rivers above Marysville. No? 



The Old Prospector 145 

Californey's the mining ground for me. It took 
just four years to get foot-loose, and back to the 
coast; as far as this derned Mormon country. 
Say! I've just left them Emma Mine fellers, they 
are sports, all right; but no good at cheating, like 
them Yankee sharpers that sold them that salted 
claim at such a Bonanza figure. Yes! I'm on my 
way to Frisco, but I'm to try Bingham on this lap. 
Anything doing over there, pardner?" 

I have put his story in, almost without a break, 
but I had to question him, at times, to keep him 
going, in my endeavor to get his life story. 

He was evidently nearing the age of sixty, and 
I suppose, this old prospector would go on in his 
way of life, till some day he would go over the 
"divide," with about the same possessions he had 
when he came into this strange life. 

Looking at it in a broad spirit, would he not be 
as well-to-do, as the man of millions, who, in dy- 
ing, leaves his wealth behind for his sons to 
squander, or his relatives to fight over? 

Rolling stones gather no moss was written on 
his face, and would be the fitting epitaph over his 
worn body, when it occupied the only piece of 
ground that he would own, when — Life's fitful 
dream was over. 

We exchanged a few things. He gave me some 
odd specimens out of his pocket, and I gave him 



146 Tenderfoot Days 

a few supplies from my travelling bag; for I was 
horseback, riding old Blueskin, a veteran canyon 
horse, on my way to Alta City. 

The last I saw of him was his ragged hat, bob- 
bing above some rocky points, as he swung around 
a bend in the trail, going down hill to the valley 
below, like a thousand more men of this strange, 
strident, virile breed of prospectors. He was a 
fair type of a set of men without whom the great 
Rocky West could not have been opened to set- 
tlement, railroads, and commerce. 

It was a long uphill ride to Alta City, with 
frowning walls high on either hand. Turn after 
turn was passed, till at last we struck the snow 
level, a little short of nine thousand feet altitude. 
I stopped awhile at a wayside restaurant, kept 
by a dapper little woman and her midget of a 
husband. She gave me a meal for a dollar, — one 
egg, two soda biscuits, a dab of butter, two corn 
pancakes with a little syrup in a dirty glass, a cup 
of coffee — of rather a washy kind — for my out- 
lay. She said "vittles was dear as freight was 
high." 

She was proud of her husband, dubbed him 
"her man," and asked me if I did not think him 
a "proper sort," as he went out the back to hack 
at some sticks for the fire. He seemed so obedient 
that the big black cigar in his mouth looked out 



The Old Prospector 147 

of place. She said that it was his "only failing," 
and that a man ought to have some bad habits to 
make him "real nice." 

Refreshed, and my horse fed at about the same 
cost as for my own food, I left the happy couple 
of this upper world life to their restaurant and 
its charms. By nightfall, I reached the camp, 
just as the lights began to sparkle in the windows 
of the buildings along the one main street. 

I had a letter to an ex-Mormon elder. He was 
in business, carrying everything in his store that 
could be wanted in such a place. He slept in a 
little recess at the rear of the store; where he had 
an equally small kitchen. I know that we two 
barely found room to sit down at a table, hinged 
to the wall. He was hospitable and said I could 
sleep on a shelf about three feet wide, under some 
blankets. He started supper, first wiping out his 
frying pan with some old copies of the Salt Lake 
Tribune. He said that it was sanitary, and beat 
a dish cloth, since you could use the paper after- 
ward to start a fire. He pounded some tough 
meat tender, he slushed his knives and forks in 
some hot but greasy water, and laid them wet by 
equally wet plates which had been washed in the 
same manner as the knives and forks. He put 
on a whole roll of butter and a lot of sad looking 
soda biscuits. Meanwhile the meat frizzled and 



148 , Tenderfoot Days 

some potatoes boiled. We had coffee out of a 
big black can, that had stood heat and smoke of 
many fires, but as it was strong and hot, it went 
down. He had some condensed milk, then a new 
thing, and of which he was very proud. Brown 
sugar did the sweetening. Being polite, I ate as 
he did, and made no comments. Still I enjoyed 
this evening meal more than I did the mid-day 
dinner at the restaurant on Main street the next 
day; for I unfortunately passed through the kit- 
chen at the wrong moment, wishing to dry a couple 
of handkerchiefs at the big stove. Looking 
around I was in time to see the Chinese cook in 
the pantry making biscuits, and spraying the nicely 
assorted nascent bread with his mouth in Chinese 
laundry style. 

That let me out. I never touched biscuit-bread 
again in that camp, or in any other. I had either 
pancakes or loaf bread. Still John did this in a 
most innocent, matter-of-fact manner that made 
me certain that it was the procedure in the prep- 
aration of biscuit, by all such oriental cooks. 

My host of the evening was a bright and clever 
man. He had a fine mind, and so as we got onto 
the subject of the Mormons and his departure 
from them, we had a good talk on philosophy. 
He was an advocate of the old idea of holding 
your life views of religion, or aught else that 



The Old Prospector 149 

was metaphysical, in an exoteric manner to suit 
the multitude, and an esoteric manner to suit your- 
self. That meant if it were popular and profit- 
able, go with the majority externally, but mentally 
hold your own view internally and subjectively. 
In fact, be a hypocrite if necessary, but do not 
give yourself away, if you change your opinion. 

"Well if this is right?" I said, "why did you 
leave the Mormons?" 

"Well, I joined them because I had to; it was 
policy and it was safe. You understand that I 
left because I could leave them safe, since Uncle 
Sam was here, and I did not like their views." 

"Oh ! You left them because of polygamy, I sup- 
pose." 

"No. I could be a polygamist, if it paid to go 
into that condition ; but not if I had to face poverty 
and feed a lot of mouths. It's not a moral ques- 
tion with me at all. Some are born to be polyga- 
mous, and it is safer for them and their morals 
to have several wives. No ! I saw more money in 
these mines, and no way of making it if I stayed 
under the great Co-op. I am running a Co-op 
of my own right here." 

"Well! when you get rich, what then?" 

"The world is wide, and I will find a nicer nest 
than rough camps and these loud-mouthed miners. 
There are Art and Literary centers in Europe 



150 Tenderfoot Days 

where one could live, if one had money." 

This educated freethinker had some willowy 
principles as the outcome of his hankey-pankey 
playing with this "exoteric" and "esoteric" phi- 
losophy applied to common every-day life. 

Coming down from this mining aerie is no 
tax on heart, but it is upon the heels. I left my 
old horse, Blueskin for his owner to bring down 
later, and took the trail afoot, since I had to con- 
nect with the narrow-gauge railroad at the depot 
eight miles below. At first over the snow it was 
easy going. Although it was June there was snow 
at this altitude, but as soon as I passed below the 
snow line, I struck the ties of the tram-cars. 
Mules took the place of the locomotive, as the 
grade was five hundred feet to the mile, too steep 
for steam. The mule cars had gone already and 
I soon got into trouble with my heels. I had to 
hurry, and so it was pound-pound steadily down 
grade, my heels hitting the ties at every step. I 
forgot the consequences of such foot-work. Eight 
miles of this at top-speed and I made the train. I 
also made some "tender-feet" too. The next day 
I was on my back, due to contracted lumbar mus- 
cles, from this severe jarring of the heels upon 
the ties. The boys in camp laughingly called it a 
tenderloin spine. .It was three days before I 
could walk erect. 



The Old Prospector 151 

While in Alta City I heard of a miner's easy 
death. He was a veteran, and was ascending to 
his work at one of the highest mines in the range. 
The trail was long and winding, and the air was 
thin at that great height. Out of breath, he sat 
to rest on a jutting rock, a short distance below the 
mine tunnel. From weariness he sighed, and as 
he did so he expired. His breath came out, but 
none returned. 

"His heart but once heaved, and forever grew 
still." 

This camp has suffered from snowslides. A 
wholesale tragedy of this kind occurred the winter 
before my arrival. The food and ammunition for 
the mines, in the winter go up the trail on pack 
mules or freight sleds. This is slow climbing. It 
is along a trail constantly covered by heavy snows, 
and swept by avalanches from higher points. The 
trail is too narrow to allow a team to turn round, 
and there are only occasional places where the 
width permits teams to pass each other. There 
is no chance to increase speed beyond an unsteady 
plod. In March a surface thaw had occurred, due 
to a wandering Chinook wind from Oregon. A 
heavy frost had followed. Then on this slip- 
pery surface a heavy coat of snow had fallen 
when Old Winter had shouted "I've not done with 
that camp yet." A heavy deposit resting on 



152 Tenderfoot Days 

such a slippery surface needed only a jar to start 
a slide. It was this oft recurring condition that 
gave to the gulch, where this tragedy happened, 
the name of "Dead Man's Gulch." Nineteen 
freight sleds, with as many men and teams, were 
slowly passing the mouth of this gulch. The lead- 
ing teamster was watching the crest of the gulch, 
and saw the first signs of a slide, "the snow- 
smoke." Instantly he yelled, "A slide! A slide! 
Whip up, Boys!" Whips cracked and mules 
struggled forward, the drivers looking up, with no 
more time than for a look. With an increasing 
roar, the whole slope seemed to start to life, and 
swept downward. Snow, rocks, trees, mixed in 
wildest tumult, formed an awful front which swept 
on, and over the trail. A moment later nothing 
was left of the long line of freighters but the 
leading team. The driver was the only living 
one to see this slide pile up in the bottom of the 
canyon, the avalanche missing him by a few yards. 
With his heart in his mouth, he pushed on, to Alta 
City, to report the loss of all the others. Buried 
a hundred feet deep they were hidden until the 
July sun, melting the snow, exposed the wreck of 
men, animals, and goods. 

Another danger beset the traveller in this can- 
yon. Near the entrance, and where the junction 
of the locomotive railroad and the mule tram-cars 



The Old Prospector 153 

occurred, was a mass of giant granite blocks fal- 
len from the towering cliffs. Some were as big 
as a house, others sharp-pointed like a tooth, while 
more looked like huge pieces of cube sugar, so 
square were they. These being accessible to the 
railroad, they were being worked up by the ma- 
sons for the walls of the Mormon Temple in Salt 
Lake City. Asleep on these blocks and about the 
crevasses were hosts of great rattle snakes, so nu- 
merous that in the heat of summer you could de- 
tect their peculiar odor as you passed by. A no- 
tice, with the legend "Be careful," was erected 
here for the safety of all travellers. A good deal 
of revolver practice took place here ; the miners' 
enjoying the sport of shooting off the heads of 
these reptiles as they lay sunning themselves on the 
rocks. I have seen the stage driver, with his skill- 
ful whip, almost cut off the heads of some rattlers 
near-by as we passed up the grade. 



CHAPTER XV 

A LIVELY MINING CAMP 

"Thus far into the bowels of the land, 
Have we marched without impediment." 

Shakespeare 

IF Alta City, as its name suggests, is a lofty 
camp, Bingham City, in the opposite range of 
the Oquirreh Mountains, was a lively camp. 

I had often wished to see a typical mining camp, 
to decide if the customary "gunfire" stories were 
true, or exaggerated. Well! I found them about 
true, as I will now relate. 

This shanty city was along a narrow canyon, 
which began in the low foothills, covered with 
sagebrush, and then extended upward with a sinu- 
ous course to what was known as Upper Bingham 
where in winter the snow lies deep and slides are 
common. 

This is rather a treeless range, and there is little 
that is picturesque in this canyon town by way of 
view. What it lacked in nature, it made up in 
154 



A Lively Mining Camp 155 

human nature. All sorts of people were there. 
To use the common phrase, "We are all here, 
Jews, Gentiles, and Mormons." The business was 
almost entirely Hebraic, the mining almost to a 
man, Gentile, but not by any means gentle, and 
the teaming and toiling by "Jack" Mormons, 
meaning thereby such Mormons as had left their 
piety in the valley, and were up in these hills, like 
the rest of the human tide, "For what there was in 
it." All these people meant to make money, and 
then go home — "To behave and be respectable." 

This canyon was well occupied by this indus- 
trious town. Against the rocky sides the houses 
pressed their backs, while their fronts, of most 
varied designs of ugliness, looked boldly on "The 
Street." This street was a narrow affair, without 
pretense of road work, and was simply a wagon 
trail up which loads of supplies and men were 
carried. People thronged it because there was 
no other place to walk. A sidewalk was an un- 
thought-of thing. Little suggestions of such a 
possibility were seen in several platforms, built 
before the larger edifices, such as the saloons and 
the hotels. These were nice things to land on, 
in stepping from the stage on a muddy day, and 
in good weather excellent places for pedestrians 
to clean their huge boots, or take a "free rest." 

When the weather was good and warm, these 



156 Tenderfoot Days 

suggestions of coming sidewalks were occupied by 
the idle and the tired to make swaps, tell stories, 
take siestas, originate rows and quarrels, and any- 
thing else to make life interesting in the camp. 

The street was a sight at all times for a street 
sweeper. The litter was terrific, for it was the 
custom of the housekeepers to sweep the surplus 
contents of their houses, with a dash of the broom, 
into the street, and then to bang their doors with 
an air of having got rid of a lot, and having done 
a good day's work. 

In this town there was no garbage brigade, with 
shovels and brooms, to deposit this litter care- 
fully in those bins labelled "For clean streets." 

The grand climax to this was on Monday morn- 
ing, after the strenuous work of Sunday was over, 
the Camp's rest day but not religious day. Packs 
of cards, used and cast away by those in bad luck, 
were swept out by the barkeep, and the roadway 
looked like an outdoor gambler's paradise. 

The "hells" were all indoors, and you had to go 
within to see them, and to smell them. I do not 
deny that the odors of these places came out, but 
the sniff you got when mixed with oxygen and the 
ozone of the Bingham hills, was nothing in its 
strength, to the full blast of the interiors. 

The rest of this canyon was taken up by the 
river or "Crik," that was always trying to pass 



A Lively Mining Camp 157 

down and squeeze its way, with considerable noise, 
over boulders, through riffles and sluices set in its 
way by the industrious placer miner, and get out 
into the open to find its peace in the bosom of the 
river Jordan. I need not name the other occu- 
pants of this narrow vent in these hills, since they 
were only tarantulas, rattle snakes, and mammoth 
spiders. 

I came into the camp with a rush, for I was a 
passenger on the four-horse stage. I had missed 
the train, and took the chance to make the camp 
that night by going through on Rory McDonald's 
stage. He was a Scotch tough. I suppose that he 
had been a good little boy in his early days, and 
his "Scotch Mither" had made him toe the crack 
to recite the shorter catechism. That may be, but 
he had left it far behind and like many a boy 
brought up to be "varra gude," he had swung to 
the opposite extreme. Going west, and doing as 
the West did in the '70's, Rory McDonald be- 
came a tough, and carried a gun. He also car- 
ried a charming brogue with a big Scotch "burr" 
on his tongue's end, a tantalizing smile, an ogling 
eye that disturbed the girls, and a most ingratiat- 
ing manner, which made him many friends, and 
popular with the travelling public. 

There were several bloody affairs, gunfights and 
homicides while I was there; but Rory McDon- 



158 Tenderfoot Days 

aid was the man who was responsible for the 
worst of these affairs. His glib tongue, and in- 
different morals beguiled to his side as compan- 
ion the wife of a lame shoemaker. The husband 
was industrious in his way, but not a lucky man. 
He did not climb, but remained financially below 
par and his wife got tired of economy and poverty. 

Rory McDonald was lavish with his money. 
His stage line was paying, and he spent his prof- 
its freely on this woman. Taylor, the shoemaker, 
was chaffed coarsely by the men of the town, about 
his wife. He was a pale-faced fellow, but his 
courage was not lacking. Since he could not man- 
age his side-stepping wife, he walked up to Mc- 
Donald, and told him to "git heeled," as the next 
time they met he would begin shooting. He 
nearly began then, but since the sheriff was within 
sight, several mutual friends parted the angry 
pair. Everybody looked for trouble; but several 
days slipped by. Men began to twit Taylor for 
his easy sufferance of this blot on his honor. Then 
it happened like a thunder clap. 

Miss Minor, a young woman the niece of the 
only resident physician, was standing on the porch 
of her uncle's office, looking for the mail. As she 
glanced down the street she saw a man coming up 
on the opposite side, with a creeping, bending step, 
and trailing a shot-gun. She recognized the red 



A Lively Mining Camp 159 

face of Rory McDonald. It all happened in a 
flash. A shout, as McDonald stopped in front of 
the shoemaker's door, which was wide open. It 
was a long narrow room, with the work bench, 
and seat at the far end. There tapping heels, 
Taylor was bending over his work. Following 
the shout "look out" from McDonald, came the 
crash of his shot gun, as it poured a charge into 
the fated man. As an echo came the revolver shot 
that struck McDonald's thigh high up. The sec- 
ond barrel followed, and Taylor fell riddled, yet 
in falling fired a second time. The bullet flew 
high, through the open door, and across the street. 
It struck the post of the porch, against which Miss 
Minor's hand rested. Slivers of wood fell on her 
head, and the bullet buried itself in the building. 

I was up a gulch opening on the main street, 
when I heard these reports. They sounded like 
the falling of a lot of lumber from a wagon. Un- 
til I saw men running I did not think the noise 
was gunfire. When I reached the spot the crowd 
held McDonald, who was white of face and bleed- 
ing fast. Others were in the shop, viewing the 
riddled yet breathing body of Taylor. He died 
as they lifted him up. 

Some were for lynching McDonald right away, 
saying it was cowardly murder, to shoot a man 
down in his store with no more warning than a 



160 Tenderfoot Days 

shout. Others swept McDonald off to the local 
jail, and had him out of sight in a few minutes. 
A divided camp discussed the horror, and it soon 
appeared that Taylor's friends were in sufficient 
numbers to carry out their threat of a lynching 
bee. The sheriff was persuaded to avoid a fight 
by taking McDonald to Salt Lake City for safe- 
keeping. During the early hours of the night, he 
was smuggled into a wagon, under some baled hay, 
and passed out of the camp without notice. When 
the posse came to the jail later, the sheriff let 
them look into all the cells, and then told them 
they would have to go to Salt Lake City for 
their man. 

This was one of many coarse blood-horrors 
common to these camps. Some months later Mc- 
Donald's money and friends carried him safely 
through a trial in court, and he came out free, 
due to the jury's sentence, "done in self defense." 
Taylor's threat "heel yourself," was deemed the 
legal reason for the sentence. 

McDonald met me in the canyon near the de- 
pot, and came up with his usual ingratiating smile, 
with extended hand. "I can't take your hand," I 
said, "I think you did a cowardly thing. You 
killed a man in an unfair fight." 

"But he would have shot me, in the same way, 
if he could." 




■■•'.■*' 





DEAD MAN S FALLS, LITTLE COTTONWOOD 



A Lively Mining Camp 161 

"Maybe, but he did not. If you had been the 
man we thought you were, you would have called 
him out, into the open, on even terms." 

McDonald looked his surprise, then scowled a 
moment, and turned on his heel with a growl. 

He was always morose after that. It Is often 
so. A man who is a killer soon loses his kindliness 
of temperament. 

Most of the camp ores went out by the narrow- 
gauge railroad. They went to the smelters at 
Sandy, at the junction of the broad-gauge rail- 
road, from whence, in the form of lead, silver, 
and gold ingots, they were transported to the 
East. The passengers for the Camp came in on 
the mixed train. Returning the engine remained 
to bring out the loaded ore cars, but the baggage 
and passenger cars made the trip by gravity, under 
brake control; for the grade was, sharp most of 
the way to the valley. I remember a wild ride, 
by this gravity method, with a party of young 
men of the assay and mining offices. We occu- 
pied a number of seats together, and were in a 
merry mood, since it was a vacation party. 

In a neighboring seat was a middle-aged aggres- 
sive Agnostic. At least he was loud in his pro- 
fession of the philosophy of "Know-Nothing" as 
to religion, although he was at the same time a 
Spiritualist as to his superstition. I never knew a 



162 Tenderfoot Days 

man of that stamp, who did not take up something 
more credulous than the religion he rejected. 
Moreover he was roughly Anti-Church and Anti- 
Christ, and thus popular with a certain crowd in 
the Camp. Now, none of us were of his way of 
thinking. Most of the young men were not spe- 
cially religious, although all of them had a little 
of it somewhere in their make-up. I was openly 
and avowedly religious, and tried my best to ad- 
vance morality and sane religion in the Camp. I 
had some influence too, and made public addresses 
on Sunday, and conducted, the only day-school in 
the Camp, on week-days. Mr. Agnostic sneered 
at me, therefore, as an Eastern "Goody-Goody," 
and took great delight, every Monday night, in 
the Social Hall in ridiculing my addresses of Sun- 
day. 

Well; on this train he went for me about the 
"fables" of the Bible. Especially he haw-hawed 
over the Jonah incident, getting off the ancient 
joke that "it was an awful fishy story, so fishy that 
it smelled disgustingly of falsehood." I let him 
go on for a time to see the kind of ammunition he 
had to use against me, and a crowd gathered 
around to listen, grin, and make "eye-brows" at 
me. I was just beginning a reply to some of his 
"points," as he termed them, when the car, which 
had been slipping along very fast, gave a vicious 



A Lively Mining Camp 163 

jolt which sat us sharply down in our car-seats. 

Then the front door banged open, and the 
brakeman looked in. Above the roar of the car 
we heard his voice. "Hold tight all. We're on 
the run. Brake's broke !" 

We were just, out of the canyon proper, with its 
many sharp curves, and were on the long straight 
track for Sandy in the bottom of the valley. This 
was fortunate, for the road was better ballasted 
than in the canyon. We fairly leaped along, the 
heavy baggage car behind the coach acting as an 
accelerator. Mr. Agnostic was silent and sat still. 
Soon signs of scare appeared, his red face visibly 
whitened and he tapped his fingers nervously on 
the seat. All of us were much stirred and took no 
notice of him. We held our breath as the little 
train swept, like a flash, past the telegraph-posts. 
Some women aboard uttered suppressed shrieks, 
bravely struggling with their oozing courage. We 
expected a smash. I was anxious, but I had a mind 
to note how differently the young men faced this 
unexpected peril. Some had their heads high, and 
nostrils wide, like a racer ready for the jump. 
Others cringed in their seats and stared unseeingly 
out of the window. A few fellows laughed. One 
man swore. I did not hear a single outcry from 
any man. It showed what a self-contained set the 
Westerners are. In Eastern waters, when con- 



164 Tenderfoot Days 

fronted with the probability of speedy death, I 
had been among men of a more emotional sort. 
I recalled a six-day gale in mid Atlantic, on a 
liner, so poorly ballasted, and so narrow of beam 
that she rolled to the extreme limit of gravity. 
Occurring every few minutes, these desperate ship 
swings broke everything that could come loose. 
These violent rolls broke the nerve of both pas- 
sengers and crew, so that I heard the fool, the 
infidel, and the coarse liver, alike pray, spurred 
thereto by fear. But after the storm was over, 
and their fright passed, these men were the same 
as before. "The dog returned to its vomit again, 
and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in 
the mire." 

The other occasion was on the Canadian Lakes. 
It was on a sort of "penny-whistle" steamer, her 
engine and boiler were so small. She had an am- 
bitious load of cordwood aboard, and was top 
heavy. Crossing Georgian Bay from Parry Sound 
we faced a furious storm. For five hours we just 
barely kept our stem to the choppy sea, and had 
the tiller ropes broke, or the helmsman lost his 
nerve and hold, the little craft would have 
broached-to, and gone down with all hands. Dur- 
ing these wild hours, humanity was the same, on 
this little boat of a freshwater lake, as it was on 
the big Atlantic liner. 



A Lively Mining Camp 165 

So, here, on this runaway train, it proved the 
stamina of both women and men, the women show- 
ing almost equal coolness with the men. Suddenly 
we rushed and rocked past buildings which bor- 
dered the Jordan River. Next we roared across 
the bridge, and toward the rising grade leading 
to the smelters at Sandy. We were safe from a 
smash. The upgrade acted as a brake, and the 
cars soon slowed down sufficiently for many to 
drop off the platform, one after another, like ripe 
pears from a shaken tree. The yardsmen slipped 
a few spare ties behind the wheels, and the train 
was at rest after a wild ride. It left us sobered. 
Mr. Agnostic came out limp and tame, with his 
aggression all gone for the time. He met some 
cold, sarcastic grins from the fellows who had 
noted his complete scare. 

"Say! Old Man, you looked as though you 
really did believe in a Hell!" 

This was the salutation he got from a passing 
miner, but he received no response from Mr. 
Agnostic. He had lost his sand. We reached 
Sandy Junction, to gather about a poor fellow who 
was brought down from Alta City "leaded." 
Long labor in lead ores brings on a painful disease. 
The blood is devitalized, the flesh takes on the 
hue of death, and the pain is both neuralgic and 
rheumatic. No one can say that the miner is 



1 66 Tenderfoot Days 

paid too much for his labor and risks. 

It was in Sandy that I met with some old-time 
courtesy from a modern young man. Perhaps 
Mr. Terhune would not now be considered mod- 
ern, but he was then very much up to the times in 
his knowledge of minerals, and the roasting and 
smelting of ores. The immense smelters at Sandy, 
whose pungent smoke was wafted south, so you 
could sniff the odor twenty miles distant, were 
under his charge. Both capital and skill were in- 
vested in the giant plant. Mr. Terhune showed 
me the process, and the products, and the great 
stacks of silver-lead bars corded up in the open 
shed. 

"Do you not fear robbery where so much bul- 
lion lies about?" 

"Just lift one of those bars and you will see if 
a thief takes anything without noise. We have 
our watchman." 

An effort was needed on my part to move a bar, 
and I saw how safe weight made wealth. These, 
with other plants, helped to make silver another 
cheap commodity, and give rise to the Silver Ques- 
tion of a later day. Mr. Terhune was a product 
of the old Dutch stock of Knickerbocker days, 
and the amiable brother of a most gifted sister 
whose name, as a writer, is well known far and 
wide in the United States. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE TOWN AND CANYON OF AMERICAN FORK 

"So green, so full of goodly prospect and 
melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of 
Orpheus was not more charming.'' 

Milton 

THE town of American Fork is a picturesque 
little place. It is situated beyond the point 
of the mountain divide that looks toward Lake 
Utah. It fronts this lake, whose sheen in the 
sunlight resembles "Blue Galilee," and is an 
American Bethsaida. The spurs of the Canyon 
are near and looking eastward the lofty knife-like 
ridge of Mt. Aspinwall is visible for nearly 
twenty miles. 

I met some strangely interesting people in this 
little town. I remained here some time to estab- 
lish a liberal school, and another in the adjoining 
town of Battle Creek. This latter place got its 
name from a fight with the Utes in very early 
days. I rode into American Fork in the rain of 
a long-continued storm. My ride was made in a 
167 



1 68 Tenderfoot Days 

heavy-wheeled farm wagon and under a flapping 
low-hung canvas cover. This afforded shelter 
from the driving rain, but was a constant weight 
on one's head and shoulders, since the bows were 
so weak and few that the cover sagged under the 
weight of the rain and the pressure of the wind. 
On our way we stopped for refreshment at a 
store-hotel. I hyphenate the word for it was a 
combination of the two. Some visible groceries 
and a strong odor of invisible cheese and kerosene 
indicated the first business. A round stove with 
round backed chairs about it, a huge spittoon, a 
desk, a counter with a bar and bottles, suggested 
the latter occupation. Also there was a rear room, 
on the door of which was written in letters of 
local talent, this legend, "DININ' RUME." So 
we had hope of something to eat in there. 

It was here I acted as a member of a volunteer 
fire department. I sat drying my garments at the 
expectoration-anointed stove, listening to the 
sounds of frying meat in the rear roorri. Sud- 
denly something soft, light and warm fell on my 
arm. I saw it was a flake of burning soot. An 
upward glance, through the stove-pipe hole, re- 
vealed a light, and in an instant more a blaze. 
The stove-pipe had parted with the heat expan- 
sion, and the under side of the shingle roof was 
on fire. "FIRE!" I yelled, and sprang on a chair 



The Town and Canyon of American Fork 169 

to get at the opening. The others yelled too, and 
the host came running in. 

The building was one of those cheap shells of 
unpainted rough lumber, which enterprising fron- 
tier men liked to build in those days. So utterly 
ugly that it was a boon to burn them down. It 
meant sharp work, if we were not to lose our 
supper, and our host his "Hotel." Sharp was 
the word. The boss was up a ladder and on the 
roof with a few movements of his long legs. Off 
came the burning shingles. Others of us tore 
apart the ceiling boards above the stove, and threw 
up water from kitchen buckets, pans and kettles. 
Five minutes later there was an awful mess around 
the stove, a big hole in the roof, a rustling, ex- 
cited crowd moving around, but the fire was out. 
The host felt generous toward the helping com- 
pany, and gave us a free supper of fried ham, 
eggs and potatoes, with the usual "hotel" coffee. 

We arrived in the town of American Fork 
about dark. We passed a two-story adobe house 
with dormer windows in the roof to lighten and 
enlarge the upper story. 

"Who owns that fine large house?" I asked. 
It was so unlike the usual adobe house in these 
Mormon settlements, that I was curious, and put 
this question to the teamster. 

"Oh! That belongs to one of Brigham's 



170 Tenderfoot Days 

relicts." 

"What?" 

"Well, one of his widows, 'grass widows' I 
mean. Mrs. Allen's her name; ought to have 
been Mrs. Young, you know." 

"Why! I thought Brigham Young married all 
of the women whom he called his wives." 

"So he did in a way. This one was sealed to 
him in celestial wedlock. He is said to have had 
several dozen married in that way. He had about 
nineteen, or twenty, married regular in the En- 
dowment House." 

"Did he build homes for all of these celestial 
wives or widows, what ever their relation might 
be?" 

"No ! Not he, but some pressure was brought 
to bear in this case, and Mrs. Allen was a very 
pretty woman then. She was a favorite of this 
great personage." 

"Oh! I see. Something after the order of the 
European Courts in the days of the French, dur- 
ing the reign of Louis XIV." 

The teamster was an intelligent man but he 
was not up in the history of Europe. He could 
doubtless tell all about the small incidents of 
American history from the Colonial days down, 
but across the Atlantic was too remote to interest 
him. 



The Town and Canyon of American Fork 171 

Here I met a man from Aberdeen, "Awbur- 
deen" so he pronounced it; and he was "that 
Scotch you could see it a distance." It is not often 
that the canny Scot is caught in the meshes of 
"soopersteeshun," such as catches the more ex- 
citable, and less cautious native of the States. 
Robert and William Peters, brothers, were both 
here. The former had been, and the latter still 
was, a Mormon. In fact, William Peters was an 
official, not only of the railroad, of which he was 
the local depot master, but he was high upon the 
rungs of the ecclesiastical ladder of this Utah 
"Kirk." Robert had left, not only his first love, 
the old Scotch Kirk of his boyhood, but his second 
love, the church of his "beguilement," as he 
phrased it. 

"I was that looney onct, that I was caught, like 
a feesh by the gills, and hooked for fair by them 
Mormons," he said to me in explanation of his 
position. 

He was now a liberal and offered to aid me 
as much as possible to start a school. 

"My brither, Willyum, is still sae saft that he 
sees not onnything but this new fangled kirk, but 
I left the same lang syne." He had the true 
Scotch grit, and was able to take his position and 
take it alone. He led a lonely life, and made his 
living by making shoe lasts, and was a master 



172 Tenderfoot Days 

workman at his trade. He could take your foot 
measure, and out of a block of maple wood, cut 
your last so accurately, that a shoe, built on it 
by a good shoemaker, resulted in the comfort of 
an individual fit. Moreover, when you put these 
lasts into ye • boots, we wore boots high up the 
calf of the leg in those days, and the shape 
"lasted." 

This was another comfort, that once discovered 
by those who could afford it, resulted in Robert 
Peters' getting many an order for the lasts, both 
for men and for women. 

There is nothing like a singular handicraft, de- 
pendent upon the individual skill, to make a man 
independent as to bread and butter. This does 
not mean that Robert ate much of either. For 
he did not. He was a singular Scot in several 
ways. He never married, and would only eat 
certain foods of his own cooking. 

He made Scotch scones, rather too solid for 
me, and these, with potatoes and salt, and cold 
water, constituted his main food supply. A little 
herring and "parritch" three times a week were 
luxuries. 

"Sugar? No I niver ate it. It's just salt with 
the parritch. Onnything else would spoil the taste 
for me." 

It was evident that Robert's simple food was 



The Town and Canyon of American Fork 173 

not burdensome, and as the high cost of living was 
then unknown, he kept well within his slender 
means. 

I found out that he put his savings into some 
Scotch charities in Aberdeen, his old home city, 
and also that he helped a little in the efforts to 
establish schools in Salt Lake City. That is to 
say he put in his mite. 

"Twa'd be the saving o' the people, if they were 
taught the Shorter Catechism and the Lord's 
Prayer." 

This was a reversion to type, by way of preju- 
dice, and a Scotchman is nothing, if he is not 
prejudiced in favor of something Scotch-born, like 
the Shorter Catechism. At heart, I expect, he 
was a believer in only a few of the universal 
truths of all religions, but he kept up a bold front 
about Presbyterianism, just out of opposition to 
the dominant rule in Utah. 

"I? Do you ask what I am? I am a true 
blue Presbyterian," he said. 

He reminded me of the Wood brothers of 
Bingham Canyon. They were teamsters and 
drove mules, bringing down timbers from the top 
of the mountains to the different mining tunnels, 
much timber being used to make these tunnels safe. 
No man not a saint far advanced can drive mules 
and not swear. In fact, it is said that mules in 



174 Tenderfoot Days 

tight places will not move unless a volley of oaths 
is first launched their way. This I had from sev- 
eral Army men whom I knew, that had driven 
mules in the Civil War. 

I am afraid mule-driving is hard on the sanctity 
of speech. The Wood brothers were Presby- 
terians, "away back" where they came from in 
the first place. They forgot all about it in camp 
life, during the six laboring days of the week 
while working with their mules; but on Sunday 
they braced up. When they put on clean shirts 
and collars — mark that — they put on something 
of their old time "away back" religion, and went 
to church, if there was one, and put their quarter 
in the church collection. 

So a good many at first sight considered them 
staunch church people, but hearing them deliver 
themselves of "mule talk" as they were driving 
their teams, they altered these views. 

"Saw two of your Presbyterian Elders to-day, 
the air was bluer than their Presbyterianism, all 
about those mules of theirs; the Wood brothers I 
mean; better look 'em up, and give them a word 
of spiritual advice," said a superintendent of one 
of the mines who liked to be considered a humor- 
ous man. Yet one of these men, sweaty and cov- 
ered with dust and having sworn all day long, 
showed signs of remorse. 



The Town and Canyon of American Fork 175 

"Say, I know I'm not right, but a man's temper 
can't keep with mules and they must be driv' that-a 
way. I am goin' to get out of this business some 
day and live like a Christian ought." 

I tell this because it is so with hundreds of 
men out West. They know the way that they live 
is not right and all of them mean to do better some 
day. The how to do it, is always beyond them 
during the present time. You can see that the 
exponents of other forms of religious life and 
faith, with such followers and hangers on, could 
not deal in criticism or denunciation of lapsed 
Mormons, or for that matter of standing Mor- 
mons, for they were no worse in their actual lives. 

Robert Peters used to go to church when the 
liberal element was strong enough, as it soon was, 
to erect a building and open services, on Sunday 
night. The lady who played the organ had a 
little girl, so small that she had to be held in the 
lap. Robert Peters became nurse for the time 
being and faithfully held and quieted the child. 

I think the old man really enjoyed, and was 
happy in assisting in this way to aid the proprieties 
of public worship, after the grave Scotch manner. 
In leaving the town for the city, where his busi- 
ness was likely to be better for him, he left for 
the little baby girl a book that she might read in 
riper years. It was an old Scotch Sunday School 



176 Tenderfoot Days 

book, thought to be adaptable to young children, 
and had for a title, The Valley of Baca and a 
beautiful figure on the cover representing a weep- 
ing woman bending over a well. "In the Valley 
of Baca they maketh it a well," accommodated 
from the Book of Psalms. 

The irreverent hoodlums, who used to sit in the 
back seats at meeting, dubbed Robert "the Pres- 
byterian Nurse," a title he was proud of to the 
last day that I knew him. William Peters was a 
man in conflict with himself. His past was too 
strong for his present, and this kept him uncom- 
fortable. His face and speech showed his ire. 
He could not accept some things of his new faith. 

"He's peeved about polygamy," said Robert, 
"he couldn't swallow that, for Wyllum is a good 
man at the bottom, and thinks much of his wife, 
wedded in Scotland; but I spewed out the whole 
lot." 

I can see his red weather-worn face, his spare 
body, and can hear his brogue whenever I call 
him to mind. A man of individuality and grit; 
with a better education, he might have made a 
mark in the world instead of being a waste timber 
thrown up by the sea of life, one of those sad 
wrecks left by the tide of religious opinion, which, 
while it has floated many to a safe haven, has en- 
gulfed a great multitude in bitterness and isolation. 



The Town and Canyon of American Fork 177 

The canyon of American Fork is worthy of 
notice. As it has been much described, I will 
simply say that its varied, rugged, rock-scenery 
rivals, in lesser magnitude, the splendors of the 
Yosemite Valley in California. A railroad ran up 
its winding, rocky sides passing over and around 
the purling, foaming mountain stream rushing 
down to the lake. 

A prosperous camp was once the business life 
of the railroad; but when I knew it, its commercial 
glory was gone. It had been smashed by the 
extravagances and expenditures of the many pro- 
moters, who are the real curse of all such enter- 
prises. They are after the "wad" held by in- 
nocent, trustful, tenderfoot-investors and stock- 
holders. They get it and go away, leaving the 
ruins of a promising camp in their wake. The 
railroad was of principal use to haul wood down 
the canyon, and the tourists up. Often the depot 
at American Fork was crowded with visitors. 

Many times I have met distinguished men there, 
bent on seeing the beauties of the mountain 
canyon; bishops, senators, generals, financiers and 
the capitalists, came and went. 

I could mention some notable names, were I not 
purposely avoiding personalities in these pages, 
and confining myself to descriptions of real life, 
and character, such as Utah presented, 



CHAPTER XVII 

TENDERFOOT SUPERINTENDENTS 

"Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, 
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground: 
Another race the following spring supplies, 
They fall successive and successive rise." 

Pope 

I WAS a Tenderfoot, in the vernacular of the 
camp, but there were many others of the same 
grade of experience. While, here and there, vet- 
erans were in charge of mining interests, tender- 
foot superintendents abounded. 

I suppose the moneyed men and the stockholders 
of the various incorporated companies in this 
camp were under the spell of romantic adventure 
in the use of their surplus wealth in this distant 
region, because distance lent enchantment to their 
view. It is remarkable how romance has influ- 
enced wealth. Otherwise rich-freighted ships 
never would have been sent across wide seas, in 
search of unknown lands, during the times of 
178 



Tenderfoot Superintendents 179 

Queen Elizabeth. It surely was romance which 
formed, under the charter from Charles II, the 
trading company with this sonorous title, "The 
Govenour and Company of Gentlemen Adven- 
turers Trading into Hudson's Bay." Romance 
helped to send Francis Drake around the world in 
search of both gold and Spaniards, and Walter 
Raleigh to make his ventures in Virginia. Ro- 
mance lies back of Arctic Voyages and Northwest 
trading trips to "where rolls the Oregon," or 
"where the wolf's long howl is heard on On- 
alaska's shore." 

I do not wonder that romantic young men were 
found and commissioned, by romantic old men, to 
superintend these mining ventures. 

These tenderfoot superintendents came out 
West smartly garbed, even to cuffs and white shirt 
collars, A few were dressed in theatrical garb, to 
look their part from the Eastern view-point. They 
looked ridiculous to the seasoned miner, used to 
hard tack and hard times. The camp had quite 
a group of such young men, full to the brim with a 
book and college knowledge of minerals, tunnel 
and shaft mining. They were educated in their 
way, but babes to the real business of finding ores 
and making the search profitable. 

Of all these tenderfoot superintendents, three 
were known to me very well, and the first I name, 



180 Tenderfoot Days 

became a warm friend. 

Clarence Waterman was a youth for his posi- 
tion, for he was only a little past his majority. He 
was growing a downy moustache and whiskers, 
but these indications of manhood were silky with 
the touch of youth. He was a really good fellow 
in many ways, especially in his cheerfulness. He 
had the youth's bump of conceit well-developed. 
But this bump may have helped him over ob- 
stacles which his youthfulness could not have sur- 
mounted. No doubt it was this conceit which ob- 
tained him his position as superintendent. I can 
imagine his father and his father's friends, at a 
company meeting, saying, 

"Clarence! Do you think you can manage our 
mines out there in Utah?" 

"Oh yes indeed. I can do that easily." So, 
being a favorite son, and a favored one by the 
company, this young Mr. Inexperience was dubbed 
Mining Superintendent, financed for his journey, 
and entrusted with the funds to open new work in 
Bingham Canyon. 

Tom Robbins was a dark-featured, gloomy-vis- 
aged young man, who grew a fierce black mous- 
tache. His eyes showed much of the sclerotic coat, 
and he had a way of rolling his eyes which made 
him look fiercer and more commanding than he 
really was. He had charge of the Grey Eagle 



Tenderfoot Superintendents 181 

group of mines, and to hear him talk you would 
feel sure the only real mineral wealth of the camp 
was in this group. He was of a musical turn, and 
put a great deal of the company's money into a 
Steinway piano, which was placed in his office in 
the best hotel of the town. He was a rattling 
player, and spent much of his spare time in the 
company of some musical young women of a neigh- 
boring boarding house. This tenderfoot super- 
intendent was ideally togged out by Eastern tail- 
ors, and looked like a stage hero, much to the 
delight of the girls. 

The third of these men was James Shuthler. He 
looked more like a dry-goods clerk in size, build, 
and manner of carriage than a forceful boss of 
mining men of the wild West. Shuthler, like most 
little men, was a great talker, but there was a 
steely look in his pale-blue eyes which showed he 
had "grit" at the bottom. He had a hobby. It 
was playing a worn, shabby violin, which he af- 
firmed was a hundred and fifty years old and once 
the property of a German master of music. He 
certainly got very sweet strains out of its strings, 
and he and Robbins were the center of attraction 
at every social and dance. 

Clarence Waterman's special interest was a di- 
vided one. When not thumping his Remington 
typewriter he was riding his rat-tailed broncho. It 



1 82 Tenderfoot Days 

was one of those vicious little beasts which show 
their mustang origin. When a horse uses his 
tail like a whisk-broom, and puts back his ears like 
a rabbit when you saddle him, you naturally look 
for trouble of some sort. Waterman loaded down 
his little broncho with a full outfit of Mexican 
saddlery, and the little beast was double-bitted, and 
so strapped fore and aft that his inexperienced 
rider seldom came to grief. He paid some horse- 
shark one hundred and twenty-five dollars for a 
fifteen dollar animal, but he was so proud of his 
nimble purchase, for the horse could run, that we 
left him alone in his glory. 

The real work in these mines was done by the 
foremen, usually old hands; while these superin- 
tendents got all the honor through correspondence 
with headquarters, and the disbursements of the 
payroll money that came regularly through their 
hands. 

One old foreman was a former cook. This I 
knew since I ate a Thanksgiving dinner which he 
produced out of the abundant stores of the mine, 
and his skill with a big cook stove. It was a fine 
assortment of food built out of canned goods, all 
save a huge steak smothered in onions. This re- 
past sufficed for six hungry miners and three visi- 
tors, besides himself, and cost the management 
quite a penny. 



Tenderfoot Superintendents 183 

But miners, I found, are nothing if not hospit- 
able ; and one never failed to be invited to a good 
meal if one happened in at the right time. 

I went up to see all of these mining ventures, 
entered all of the tunnels, and went down all of 
the shafts; also asked a great many useless ques- 
tions, while the working-shift patiently answered 
between pauses in shovelling rock. 

The Ilion Mine, Clarence Waterman Superin- 
tendent, — if you had read the sign board on the 
tunnel house, — was a wet mine. They were sup- 
posed to be seeking the rich mineral vein, beneath 
the discovery hole on the summit of a rocky bluff 
overlooking the canyon. 

An able mineralogist, a learned geologist and 
the surveyor specialist, — all high priced men, — 
had reported that the signs indicated a big bonanza 
below this discovery hole. So after it they went 
with men, money and machinery. When I went 
into the wet workings, the tunnel's breast was nine 
hundred feet from the entrance. A large gutter 
was cut, as they ran the tunnel in, since the face 
and walls oozed water so constantly that a little 
river ran out of the entry and down the mountain 
side. This whole tunnel was timbered and re- 
quired no end of prepared wood and a couple of 
carpenters to keep up with the miners. Now 
wages were high, four or five dollars a day, tim- 



184 Tenderfoot Days 

ber scarce and high too. You could see money 
going into the hole, but you could not see it coming 
out. The Ilion people had great faith in their 
great mine, but that did not prevent its being a 
great failure. Stereotyped reports of the workings 
were sent in every week, and for a time the goose 
that laid the golden egg kept on laying it. The 
miners laughed over these reports, but receiving 
their wages regularly they worked on at what 
their practical knowledge foresaw would be a bar- 
ren result. At the time I left Utah the mine was 
closed down, another one among a hundred fail- 
ures. 

I started a day school. The community had 
voted against a public school, for the population 
was a transient one, and little interested in family 
life and in the care of children. Several respon- 
sible men urged me to undertake a private educa- 
tion for the public. I rented a part of a vacant 
hotel, the parlor and dining room, and this made 
a good sized schoolroom to accommodate fifty 
scholars. 

I also purchased the red-wood shelving of a de- 
funct dry-goods store, and worked up this lumber, 
with a little outside help, into seats and desks in 
lieu of the usual school furniture. People were 
not so particular then about the outfitting of a 
schoolhouse. In a camp like Bingham, where the 



Tenderfoot Superintendents 185 

church building was an old saloon, somewhat al- 
tered, it was not difficult to make a hotel parlor 
serve for a schoolhouse. 

These camp buildings were of the up-and-down 
rough-lumber sort, with the cracks covered with 
strips of the same stuff. None of the buildings 
were painted, save one pretentious hotel, the aris- 
tocrat of the camp. 

I used to have the room full of boys and girls, 
who came at 9 A. M. on Mondays to pay their 
school dues in the dirty, sticky currency of the day. 
"Shin-plasters," these little bills of the Federal 
Treasury, were called. We seldom saw a piece of 
silver coin, lor it had all gone either to Canada 
or Europe. Our school hours were from 9 A. M. 
to 1 P. M., with a recess midday. I secured a 
supply of old books, maps, and blackboard mate- 
rial in Salt Lake City, and gave them free to the 
school. The cost of this education to each scholar 
was a fifty-cent "shin-plaster" paid every Monday. 

Most of the children were studious and seemed 
glad to have the chance to get at their books. I 
had a little trouble now and then. For instance, 
a couple of boys of twelve and fourteen years, sons 
of a saloon man, seemed to be ambitious to rival 
the toughs of the bar-room. One of them carried 
a big knife on the inside of his leg-boot, while the 
other secreted a small caliber Smith & Wesson 



1 86 Tenderfoot Days 

revolver in his pants rear-pocket. This last young- 
ster was quite ferocious in his talk, for he asserted 
that he had "got his man." It seemed, on inquiry, 
that he had accidentally shot another boy, in rough 
play, with a pistol. The foolish jests of the roughs 
about his father's place had taken serious root in 
his mind, so he was really proud of his "bloody 
record," like any other "bad man." I took their 
arsenal away and requested their father to come 
for the weapons. This he did, and when I sug- 
gested he lock up these weapons and keep his boys 
out of harm's way he declared his boys were not 
being raised "milk-sops," but to fight their way 
through life. Probably years later these boys may 
have fulfilled their foolish father's wishes and fig- 
ured as "gunmen," ending their lives by dying 
with their boots on. 

This school ran all winter and well into spring, 
when an epidemic of scarlet fever entered the 
camp, through some Mormon teamsters from the 
valley towns, and perforce the school was closed 
for the season. This schoolroom was used two 
evenings of each week for musicals. I had a small 
organ, with handles, which Clarence Waterman 
and myself carried back and forth from school to 
church, as it was needed. 

To these Sings in the schoolroom the tender- 
foot superintendents before mentioned and a num- 



Tenderfoot Superintendents 187 

ber of young women interested in music and church 
work used to come. Without doubt the sex at- 
traction had much to do with this weekly rally of 
the younger element, since the men came generally 
as escorts of the ladies. How much religion is 
based on human interest, and how much on super- 
human interest, is a vital query hard to answer cor- 
rectly. I suppose the mysteries of life, and its ap- 
parent dissolution, have a strong pull, which is 
almost superhuman in its power for church going; 
but I also think that Reuben and Rachel cut a 
figure in the making of a congregation. There 
were good musicians and some fair singers who 
were willing to exercise their gifts and spend time 
in this way, but no sense of duty was the motive ; 
only the simple idea of something pleasant to do. 
When it seemed an unpleasant task it was not 
done, and they did not trouble to come. 

I was forced to do a little mining. I occupied a 
very small house, built close into the hill on a 
narrow slip of ground; the road passing so close 
in front that the ore wagons, in going by, often 
struck the steps in front. A roaring creek was 
just across the road. A slide of earth from the 
steep hill, back of the house, bulged in the kitchen 
wall. I procured the miner's weapons, a pick and 
shovel, and began digging away the dirt. 

"Say! pan out that dirt. You may find gold 



1 88 Tenderfoot Days 

color." Waterman was passing and called to me. 
I laughed at the boyish idea, but took his advice. 
In the creek a few feet below I washed out several 
pans of dirt, using the rotary movement which 
carries the surplus dirt over the edge of the pan, 
but no color appeared for some time. I persevered 
and was rewarded by seeing a sparkle in the black 
sediment in the bottom of the tin dish. This oc- 
curred every now and then. By the time I tired, 
and had removed all the land-slip, I was possessed 
with a very small can of sediment. This I washed 
over carefully and collected a few small grains of 
color. In the assay office, later, I found my hour's 
labor had yielded fifty cents' worth of gold. This 
was a wage of four dollars a day of eight hours 
of labor. 

I record this to show how alluring the conditions 
were to a tenderfoot. The creek was a rich placer 
in many spots, the hills had often signs of pay 
dirt, while the rocks, when mined, contained visible 
veins of lead, silver, and gold leading to ore 
pockets, and sometimes to great ore deposits which 
required only the science of the smelter to reduce 
to commercial wealth. 

I witnessed the luck of one tenderfoot superin- 
tendent. He had lost his job, for his company had 
"gone broke," as the saying is. Tom Darmody 
was a very easy-going fellow, who had brought out 



Tenderfoot Superintendents 189 

his wife that he might have home cooking instead 
of cook-house fare. They lived in a little shack 
on the other side of the creek. He was mining 
on his own account, and I often saw him come 
home wet and disgusted with his hard labor. One 
day he got back in time to find his wife on the 
roof of the shack shrieking, "A snake ! A snake !" 

A big rattler was in the kitchen, and had driven 
the mistress outdoors. This was nothing strange, 
for the rocks were full of these reptiles in the 
warm weather. A little pistol work laid out Mr. 
Rattlesnake, with eight buttons on his tail, a harm- 
less but hideous corpse on the kitchen floor. A 
bevy of housewives soon assembled to view the 
creature and to congratulate the lady of the house 
on her escape and the bravery she had shown. I 
feel sure that Tom Darmody gallantly told it 
around that his wife did the shooting. One day 
Darmody came in on the stride and shouting, 
"We've struck it rich!" He had broken into a 
large ore chamber. 

"Our fortune's made, my dear! We can go 
home in a month." 

They did. In a few days he sold out his fine 
prospect to a mining crew for $25,000 and left 
for the "East and Happiness," to use his own 
words. He was sensible. He did not stay to re- 
invest his fortune, nor gamble it away in expecta- 



190 Tenderfoot Days 

tion of still better luck. 

There was one lucky superintendent who was 
not a tenderfoot. Old Judge Eelis, a man of sixty- 
five, and his wife, an old-time lady of rare amiabil- 
ity, were residents of the camp. I boarded with 
Judge Eells for two months and found him a man 
of fine character. He always had family worship 
in his house every Sunday, and thought he was 
doing well for the West. And so he was. Late 
one Saturday night he and his partner opened up 
a large pocket of ore ; he insisted on waiting until 
Monday before demonstrating its extent. You 
see the grit of the man in this action. His partner 
offered him $ 1 6,000 for his prospects before Mon- 
day was past. Listening to his wife's plea, he ac- 
cepted the sum offered, and the old couple re- 
turned to their home in Waukesha, Wisconsin, 
there to enjoy their good fortune. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

a tenderfoot's romance 

"How happy I'd be with either, 
Were t' other dear charmer away." 

Old Melody 

THIS is a story of divided affections, which 
threatened at one time to end in the divided 
lives of two young people. Youth has its ro- 
mances, and so had the youth, Clarence Water- 
man. 

I was going down the canyon by the way of the 
mule tramway. It was built along the canyon side, 
a little higher than the street. I used to look out 
for rattlers, as it was a favorite place for the 
snakes. They would crawl out in the sun and lie 
along the track. The mules used to be affronted 
at them and the drivers used to crack their whips 
and sometimes their guns at these reptiles. 

The tarantula spider often occupied the track. 
I met one the day of which I am now speaking. 
He was on a tie, and up on his long, high, hairy 
191 



192 Tenderfoot Days 

legs. His wicked eyes were on me when I first 
caught sight of his pose. I knew that he was ready- 
to jump, for this spider is as aggressive as he is 
big. He did spring; but so did I, and he passed 
me on the inside track, and struck the rocks, up 
which he jumped out of sight. I later saw one 
like him. He was in a big bottle and safe in al- 
cohol to preserve him on his journey east. His 
eyes and hairy limbs were suggestive of the temper 
of this fighting spider. 

Mrs. Eells, who was with me, said, "How hor- 
rid! Take it away." This expressed everybody's 
feelings. 

It was just after this little episode in camp life 
that I saw Clarence Waterman pass down the 
street astride his broncho, garbed in full regimen- 
tals as a broncho buster. I shouted aloud to him, 
"Where are you bound for aboard that cayuse?" 

"I'm due at the canyon-mouth to race Miss 
Gladys Glynn's white pony. The wager is a new 
saddle. Come on!" 

He rode off. I followed along the track more 
leisurely, until I neared the depot. 

A good sized crowd was gathered there, for 
just beyond this terminus of the carline the canyon 
opened out into a big bay of land encircled with 
the lower foothills. In this space was the cattle- 
men's corral, the slaughter yards for the camp 
and, around the outer limits, was a roadway in 



': - -:: > 




A Tenderfoot's Romance 193 

imitation of a racing oval. This was the horse- 
racing circle, minus restraining fence and bleacher 
seats and grandstand. There was a rough sort of 
stand for privileged spectators, and I saw the 
elite of the camp beginning to occupy these seats. 

A young woman sat on a white horse. The ani- 
mal was small, but neat of limb and a pet by the 
way its rider was caressing the arching neck and 
silver mane. This was Miss Gladys Glynn, the 
open-air belle of the region and the pride and ad- 
miration of the cowboys. She was a rustic beauty 
of the brunette type, and as her women friends 
said of her, "as smart as a whip." Her eyes were 
full of fire and fun. Her tongue was quick in 
repartee and her mind active, intelligent and 
charming. A good many of the men were charmed 
with her, and very violently so was Clarence 
Waterman. He had gone riding with this young 
horsewoman several times and the present race, 
just coming off, was the result of a bet as to the 
speed of the white pony and the brown broncho. 

A tall, dark-bearded man, in black coat and 
top boots, was slapping a whip on his open palm 
and talking to the girl rider. This I knew was 
Dr. Howard Glynn, her father, and the owner 
of the big cattle range and ranch just below us 
in the valley. It was his sheep and cattle that 
ranged the hills and who employed the bunch of 



194 Tenderfoot Days 

cowboys standing by. It was his sage-brush fed 
mutton that the camp ate, and so disliked. But 
as the other fresh meat was not handy, we became 1 
very familiar with Doc Glynn's sage-brush beef 
and mutton; especially the mutton, as it retained 
the sage taste with more pronounced effect, after 
cooking, than did the beef. 

He was a veterinary surgeon, retired from that 
trying occupation, as he said, and fast getting rich 
off a free range and sage-fed live-stock. The 
canyon and camp was his bonanza, and he was 
working it for all it was worth, in the way of a 
close and ready market for meat. 

Gladdie Glynn was therefore well known, and 
the center of beaux of all sorts and ages. It was 
said that a very prominent Mormon apostle want- 
ed her for one of his wives, but if anybody dared 
to repeat this rumor he was very likely to get into 
a fight with the men of the camp. , 

"Come on, Prof," called Tom Robbins, as I 
reached the depot, "you are just in time for this 
Rodeo. Let's see Waterman licked to a frazzle 
by Gladdie and her pony." 

Waterman had told me some things about his 
home life, and once or twice of an engagement to 
a sweet looking girl, whose photograph stood on 
his bureau. I thought at first he was just boast- 
ing, but I found that it was a fact when a letter 



A Tenderfoot's Romance 195 

came reporting her illness. 

He kept the telegraph operator busy for some 
days, until the young lady was reported out of 
danger. It looked at one time as though he would 
throw up his job and hurry East. Hence I knew 
that he was serious and that he was an engaged 
man. 

I did not quite like his flirting with Miss Glad- 
die Glynn, who showed more partiality for him 
than she did for any other of her many admirers. 
I suppose it was this evident choice of the girl and 
the propinquity due to their horse interests that 
made them a little more than friends or chums 
and threatened a romantic end to their acquaint- 
ance. 

I could not see how Waterman could be car- 
ried away thus, if he really loved the girl in the 
East who wore his ring, but man, especially the 
younger man, is a fickle force, as much so as for- 
tune is a fickle jade. So I watched these two as 
they met and noted the interested glances of both 
and the more-than-warm handclasp. 

It was a friendly affair, this race. The usual 
fussy preliminaries by the self-appointed arrang- 
ers followed the meeting of the principals. Until 
I saw the crowd I was not fully aware of the in- 
terest of the occasion, nor of the popularity of the 
contestants. Four officious cowboys, with an air of 



196 - Tenderfoot Days 

proprietorship, attended to Miss Gladdie's saddle, 
bridle and bit. Another set of boys did the same 
for Waterman's broncho, and the way in which 
the creature switched its bottle-brush tail was a 
strong proof that the animal's evil disposition was 
fully awake. 

Soon all was ready. It was to be four times 
around the circle, which meant just two miles. Doc 
Glynn fired his gun, and they were off, neck and 
neck. Miss Gladdie had the pole by courtesy and 
cowboy wit. Now Waterman's little beast was a 
runner, when mad, and he was mad on this occa- 
sion. I could see that the girl was the best rider. 
She was born to the saddle, for her father had 
been a cattle-man since her childhood. She was 
raised to ride a horse. 

Once round the circle they passed us in a cloud 
of dust, still nearly abreast, the broncho having 
the greater strength, but being handicapped by 
being on the outer circle. Yells, cheers, and hat 
wavings saluted them. Soon we saw the dust ris- 
ing on the homestretch, and then something hap- 
pened. Waterman put too much spur into his en- 
couragement at this point and his broncho showed 
his breed by a vicious buck almost unseating the 
rider. 

It needed but this little show-off to put the pale 
pony in the lead by several lengths, and Miss 



A Tenderfoot's Romance 197 

Gladdie passed the tape, giving the dust of her 
passage to Waterman's cavorting steed, which' 
came in more like a crab than a horse, a loser by 
seven lengths. The outcome was very popular, of 
course, and Clarence was in for a new saddle and 
bridle for the fair winner. 

"I knew that useless mustang of yours would 
play hob," said James Shuthler; "don't see where 
you can like the beast. I'd shoot him for just that 
sort of trick." 

"Why did you use so much spur?" I asked the 
loser. 

"Well, it's easy for you to talk, but I thought 
that just that much of a prick would do the busi- 
ness. I was gaining fast at the time." 

"You don't mean to say that you were so un- 
gallant in intention as to mean to win?" I said. 

"Surely I meant to win; why not? It was a 
race, and gallantry was considered ruled out of the 
contest by the lady's own wish." 

A merry crowd it was after the race. Several 
cowboys showed off their tricks, but by degrees 
the crowd thinned out and left the horsemen to 
themselves. 

This event brought the two young people closer 
together and was the means of starting this ro- 
mance. A good many knew nothing of Water- 
man's eastern sweetheart, and supposed that he 



198 Tenderfoot Days 

was the favored one. In fair play they "kept off 
the grass," as they called it. Several days later 
Clarence Waterman came to me. 

"Can you get away to join a riding party to 
Provo in the next valley? We are going to start 
to-morrow at five in the morning and make the 
fifty miles by sundown. The next day we ride on 
to the end of the railroad, fifty miles further. Doc 
Glynn has a lot of cattle coming up from Nephi 
and Miss Gladdie and I are going with the boys 
and her father. Would like you to come." 

"Cannot do it just now. I have to go over to 
Alta City to-morrow, and it is a three-day trip 
before I get back." 

So the Romance began. Just how far these two 
understood one another I do not know to this 
day. As far as looks go, they were mutually at- 
tracted, and I think that the girl was really in love 
at last. She had passed through much flirtation, 
of course, and had received proposals by the dozen 
from susceptible young men, cowboys, miners and 
men of means. It was evident she was not so 
heart-free as formerly, for Waterman's good 
looks and good breeding had made an impression. 

They started on the trip and had a merry time 
of it the first day. A ride of fifty miles was a com- 
mon thing for such people and such ponies. Their 
stock of horseflesh was tough of breed and could 



A Tenderfoot's Romance 199 

wear out more mettled and expensive stock, un- 
used to these hills and valleys. By the afternoon 
of the second day they met the herd of cattle, and 
the Doctor and his cowboys took charge of the 
return drive. His daughter and Waterman were 
to return by train from the railroad terminus, their 
horses being used by the cowboys. 

Right then it happened. An unexpected delay 
of a day in the transfer of the cattle by the former 
owner, a Mormon rancher, gave the young couple 
an idea. It was to ride over to Nephi, eighteen 
miles south, and return on that surplus day. They 
wanted to be alone. I am certain Clarence was 
fast forgetting his Ida Gertrude in the East, whose 
portrait stood on his dressing table in Bingham. 
The bright eyes and charm of Gladdie Glynn were 
doing the work of forgetfulness. Such is pro- 
pinquity, the motive power of many a marriage 
which afterward is regretted. Doctor Glynn 
seemed to favor the desires of the two young peo- 
ple, and said: 

"Be back in time to give the ponies a good rest 
before our start to-morrow. They don't ride back 
on the cars like you two lucky ones." 

They rode off. They had an ideal lover's ride 
down to Nephi. Here they were to dine, rest and 
return in the afternoon. Both horses had cast a 
shoe. The blacksmith was absent, gone "to see a 



200 Tenderfoot Days 

man," and two hours passed before he returned. 
It took another hour before the horses were ready 
for the road, and by that time it was almost dark. 
Meanwhile one of those fierce wind-storms arose. 
Locally it is known as a Mormon storm, because it 
is all wind, dust and no rain. It is the dread of 
the rider, especially if the rider be a woman. Now, 
the two young people were not clad for a storm, 
for they had left their heavy dustcoats with the 
outfit at the station that morning. They had 
thought to ride light and return in the warm after- 
noon. 

Then another thing happened. Was it fate? 
A deluge of rain followed the blow, a thing seldom 
occurring in this locality, and for hours the storm 
raged. 

"What shall we do? We can't go on till this is 
over," said Gladdie Glynn. 

"We are fixed to stay here until to-morrow; I'm 
almost afraid to say it," answered Clarence Water- 
man. 

"Oh ! What will father think? He knows I'm 
to be back with him this evening. He'll think 
we've started out before the storm." 

"But we can't start now, in such a storm as 
this; can we?" objected Clarence. "We'll have to 
put up at this one-horse hotel and start to-morrow 
at sun-rise." 



A Tenderfoot's Romance 201 

"What will people think of us?" said Gladdie 
Glynn. She looked hard at her companion. 

"It's none of their affair. We are straight liv- 
ers. I'm not afraid, if you are not, to face silly 
talk!" 

"Well! If you think so, I'm game to stay on 
here. I'm no more afraid of talk than you. But 
I fear father will scold sharply for this delay. 
You know by this time he has a fiery temper at 
times; and this will be one of those temper-times." 

"Oh ! When he knows the reason of our delay 
I'm sure he would rather you stayed snug under 
cover here than ride in the rain and darkness to- 
night!" 

They made known their needs to the hotel- 
keeper. Now, he was a Mormon and saw a chance 
to play a trick on these two young gentiles. Some 
time afterwards I myself put up at this hotel and 
met this very man. I did not like his eye. The 
eye is the gateway of the mind, and I saw a malice 
in his eye which explained some things concern- 
ing this romance of the stormbound couple. 

"I can accommodate you, young people. Are 
you married or are you intending to git married?" 
he said to them. 

This was not a proper question, and yet it 
seemed warranted by the circumstances. 

"No, indeed," .said Gladdie Glynn, "and it's 



202 Tenderfoot Days 

none of your business." 

"I only asked, young people," answered the 
landlord, "as there is only one spare room for 
travellers, but I can fix it so as you needn't know 
there's any one but yourself. I have a nice cot-bed 
in the alcove, which can be curtained off. The 
young man can use the lounge by the window. I've 
done this way for lots of travellers, and no harm 
came of it." 

Clarence and Gladdie looked at each other for 
a long moment; their eyes saw, mutually, respect 
and confidence in the glance. 

"I can stand it all right if you can," said Clar- 
ence; "it's for you to say. I can go out and sit in 
a chair in the office if necessary." 

"If it won't hurt you it won't hurt me," said 
Gladdie. "I don't wish you to sit up all night." 

"Well, then, landlord," said Clarence, "fix it 
up as you say." 

Storm-bound, and mutually confident of one an- 
other, and also brave to face the tattle of the gos- 
siper, they did this thing and occupied the one 
room in the inn. The girl slept out her tiredness 
behind the curtains and Clarence snored to his 
heart's content on the lounge by the window and 
behind a blanket thrown over two chairs. 

They were innocent of harm, but would the 
world believe it? 



A Tenderfoot's Romance 203 

It was a fair morning, and as early as they 
could get off they left Nephi. They made the 
railway depot in four hours for breakfast with Dr. 
Glynn. He had been in a terrible temper over 
their absence, and when he learned of the facts 
of their hotel experience he looked darkly at 
Waterman. 

"You young fool! Can't you see what a cloud 
this is on Gladdie? You've got to marry her now 
whether you mean it or not," said the enraged 
father. 

Now, if Clarence had not been engaged, as he 
was to Ida Gertrude, he could have answered this 
demand with zest. 

But here was the rub. It had come over him 
on the ride that morning that he was in a fix. He 
felt sure, from Gladdie's looks, she was ready to 
say "yes" to a vital question, but he found he was 
not ready to put it. 

He suddenly realized that he was a fool to 
play with fire in engaging a girl's affections, so 
that she had consented to a compromising situa- 
tion, that would reflect upon her honor in the eyes 
of a cynical world. 

"Why have I to do that? I haven't asked Glad- 
die to marry me, and I don't know if she would," 
he answered. 

Dr. Glynn roared with rage. 



204 Tenderfoot Days 

"Well, put the question, and be quick about it ! 
She's got to say yes!" 

Clarence went to Gladdie, but like a woman, 
she refused to see him. His evident unreadiness 
and lack of ardor in his suit at this crisis mortified 
her mind and wounded her feelings. 

Her father went to see her and she said to him : 
"I won't be forced to accept any man in this way! 
Let the nasty people talk if they must. My mind 
is clean of any fault." 

Now, this daughter was his pet and pride and 
he could not be cross long with her, and soon gave 
way to her wishes. The young woman was 
wounded at Waterman's indecision. It came out, 
as they returned by train that afternoon, that he 
confessed his engagement to Ida Gertrude in the 
East. She was angry, as they say, "up to the 
hilt." 

"How dare you play with me in this way? I 
hate you now; don't speak to me again," said the 
girl. 

In this frame of mind they rode into Salt Lake 
City both as miserable as disenchanted mortals 
can be. Clarence was on the fence and could not 
come down on either side. He could not break 
with his sweetheart, and he could not propose to 
Gladdie when it came to the pinch. She saw, with 
a woman's quick intuition, the situation of this last 



A Tenderfoot's Romance 205 

admirer. He had almost won her love, and she 
resented his lack of courage to offer himself with 
the ardor of a lover. 

When it was all known publicly, through the 
lightning speed of gossip which carries tattle 
faster than the wind, many threats against Water- 
man were heard. 

I expected some one of the cowboys would shoot 
him, but Dr. Glynn put a stop to all that by grimly 
saying: 

"If any shooting comes off I'll do it. Don't let 
me hear of any of you fellows interfering, unless 
you want me to take a shot at you ; keep off !" 

Finally Clarence could stand it no longer. He 
wrote to Ida Gertrude and told her the whole 
story and asked to be released. Quickly came 
back by an early mail his ring with no word in the 
letter. He then went to Gladys Glynn and said 
that he was free to ask her to marry him. This 
he did before her father. 

"I answer you no!" she said with snapping 
eyes. "I want no belated lover, such as you have 
proved to be." 

"Cannot you forgive me and let me keep the 
talk from injuring your reputation?" he said. 

"I can forgive you, but my reputation is not in 
need of your help. If any one slanders me I, too, 
can shoot, and will do so." 



206 Tenderfoot Days 

When the camp knew that Clarence had the 
mitten from Miss Gladys there was a great laugh, 
much joy among the jealous and good deal of chaff 
for the troubled Waterman. He that had two 
strings to his bow a little while before now was 
without any strings, and his life was without music. 
Thus strangely does life alter our outlook in a 
few eventful days. 

I was very sorry for him and said, "Let me 
write Ida Gertrude and tell her just the facts. If 
you two are really lovers this trouble ought to be 
mended in some way." 

"Well, do so as my friend; only be sure to put 
it just as it is," replied Clarence. 

I did write as an advocate of my friend and 
showed the innocence of both parties. That it 
was simply a case of youthful imprudence. That 
Clarence was very sorry that he had been carried 
away by a charming girl and that his inability to 
love her, as she expected, was a sign that his love 
still burned true for Ida Gertrude. Could not 
she forgive him? If she was as much in love with 
him as he was with her, she should not let a just 
anger and some pride wreck the happiness of both. 

I think that I put it with a wisdom almost like 
Solomon's and it worked out happily. 

Miss Ida wrote me that she supposed the West 
was a loose living place and that Clarence needed 



A Tenderfoot's Romance 207 

the East to keep him true. She said she forgave 
him, and if he chose to write her she was willing 
to hear what he had to say. 

I told Clarence this and he brightened up at 
once. I think that his Remington typewriter did 
some good work about that time. I knowjetters 
came and went. 

Not long afterwards he sold his broncho. Next 
I knew he had resigned his office and was no longer 
a tenderfoot superintendent. 

"Dear friend," he said to me, "you did me a 
good turn. Ida and I are once more as we were at 
first, and she wears my ring. I expect to put an- 
other ring on that dear finger soon, as I have been 
offered a good position in New York City. I'm 
going East next week." 

I was glad to hear of this end of the matter, 
but was sorry to see him go. I saw him off at 
Salt Lake City. Although I heard of his mar- 
riage, a year later, and received a letter or two 
from him, I never met him afterwards. 

I knew that he was happily wedded and that he 
was in good shape to become a successful business 
man in New York City. 

The other party to this story continued her out- 
door life, admired as usual, yet strangely cool to 
all lovers. A few years later her father sold out 
his interests and went to California, where his 



208 Tenderfoot Days 

daughter entered a woman's college in Oakland. I 
heard of her graduation. She was a bright girl, 
and is now the charming wife-companion of a well 
known university professor in Berkeley. 

It may seem strange that this open air girl- 
should become the inmate of a studious home, but 
life runs by contrasts. The professor, who is her 
adoring husband, found in her active personality 
just the foil to his scholastic gifts, while she saw 
opening to her a world of letters, as new and as 
interesting as the world outdoors, which she had 
in her youth so gracefully championed amid camp 
and cowboy life. 



CHAPTER XIX 

MIND AS THE MASTER WORKER 

"Mind is the great lever of all things; human 
thought is the process by which human ends are 
ultimately answered." 

Daniel Webster 

IN this age of applied psychology it is interest- 
ing and educative to note the mastery of mind 
over matter in the settlement, by civilized people, 
of the wild wastes of Utah at the time of the great 
Mormon trek across the plains. Mind was domi- 
nant, later, in the scientific search for, and recov- 
ery of, the mineral values, so long hidden and 
useless, in the mountains of the territory. 

The interaction of these two forces, the mental 
and the physical, produce the evolution and there- 
by the development of a country and its people. 
Then comes wealth, comfort, ease, and further 
exercise of mind to its higher possibilities. When 
life is low-graded and the human mind content to 
grub in the ground or to hunt wild animals for a 
209 



210 Tenderfoot Days 

living, a land remains the habitat of wild people. 

A mind of a higher grade was the main asset 
of the white discoverers of America. Their supe- 
rior weapons, skill and transportation were en- 
tirely due to the advance of mind from the times 
of the dark ages. The early voyagers from Norse- 
land, in their open-decked ships, were hardy sea- 
men, but they brought no advancement to the new 
continent, since these rude warriors had no mind 
above fighting and despoiling their foes. 

All that was unfamiliar to them in human life 
was regarded as an enemy to be overcome by 
force. It was the Era of Might, and the one of 
the most Might was Right, because he won. The 
barbarian era has, at all times, been hard to super- 
sede, and even in these days of supposed "Kul- 
tur" there are strong advocates of a reversion to 
type of the old Norse Vikings, Attila the Hun, or 
Caesar and his legions. 

We do not affirm that the mentality of the Mor- 
mon leaders was very high. These leaders were 
men of keen wit but of little culture, judged by 
their speeches and writings, while the people in 
general were very commonplace. They had a 
few scholars who occupied a back seat, for the 
men of action and administration were the real 
shapers of history in Utah. 

Of course the mentality found in the religious 



Mind as the Master Worker 211 

faith of the people was due to a religious genius 
like Joseph Smith. If you consider a moment this 
young man at the beginning of his mission, un- 
known and obscure, yet possessing an inner men- 
tal purpose and power sufficient to win over by 
words, declarations, arguments and exhortations a 
host of hard-headed Eastern and Western people, 
you will see at once the power of mind when it is 
illumined by a purpose born of faith in a revela- 
tion from a higher Power. 

The emerging of Joseph Smith from obscurity 
to notoriety, as the American Prophet of a new 
faith, reads like that of the emerging of Mo- 
hammed, an uninfluential and epileptic young man, 
amid the turbulent tribes of Arabia when he be- 
came the Father of the Faithful, to the Arabians, 
as Abraham became the same to the Hebrews. All 
three characters are graphic illustrations of the 
mastery of the mind. 

It does not follow that an enthusiasm and de- 
votion which carries one to the death is proof of 
the cause advocated. It does prove the sincerity 
and earnestness of the advocate making the sacri- 
fice. 

Many good people have perished in a poor 
cause which they thought sublime. Delusions of 
mind distort its visions, but not its powers. It is 
for this reason that the exalted fanaticism of the 



212 Tenderfoot Days 

early Mormons carried them on to strenuous 
deeds, and yet did not impair their powers of com- 
mon sense. They could subdue a wild country and 
learn to utilize its hidden wealth. 

We are prone to think it all bad, when some 
part of a delusion obsesses a race or generation. If 
this were true the Mohammedan illusion would 
be rotten from core to circumference. Some in- 
tense people so assert, but such is not true, as calm 
reflection shows. A fine civilization existed in 
Spain under the Mohammedan Moors for seven 
centuries, superior in art and science to the ruder 
life of both Franks and Teutons. 

So, while the products of Joseph Smith's visions 
and declarations were often erratic and fanatic, 
nevertheless much honest-hearted goodness in 
word and deed is in evidence if you are fair enough 
to look for it. I found it to be so, and I affirm 
that the mental influence of this Latter Day faith 
had a constructive power to establish on barren 
ground and amid the rude forces of nature, a 
settlement of homes and firesides devoted to re- 
ligion and to an honest life. Putting by the ex- 
tremes of an ecstatic people, it is undeniable that 
they excelled in usefulness as light excels darkness 
the roving Indian aborigines. 

When I walked about that modern Zion of Salt 
Lake, "and told the homes and streets thereof," 



Mind as the Master Worker 213 

I could not fail to read the evidence of the power 
of mind over matter which had built a city where 
the Indian's wikiup had stood and had made 
farms out of land whose only products once were 
sage-brush and reptiles. 

Still, the Mormon mind was not scientific, but 
ecstatic, and walked by faith, although it had the 
common sense to work by sight. It was a fine mo- 
tive force to lift to higher levels the lives of multi- 
tudes otherwise inert, and to put the spade or hoe 
of industry into idle hands. It redeemed a waste. 

Utah would not have advanced to her present 
prosperity and power had not another kind of 
mentality sought out its treasures. It may seem 
a sordid motive to seek for gold and silver in place 
of seeking for the sanctuary and salvation. Yet 
such a sordid search has invariably preceded the 
higher development of a country. Trade has its 
argonauts and argosies which in the end serve 
for higher things. 

With minds alert for mineral treasure, men 
drifted into the Territory, at first a few, and later 
on with a rush to supplement the civilizing work 
of the Mormons. To some their advent seemed 
a destructive one, for they were not religious, and 
scoffed at the religion of the Mormons. They 
pointed out its weak, if not wicked elements, and 
laughed in derision of such a faith. They were 



214 Tenderfoot Days 

a rude lot of humanity, and the Mormons coun- 
tered back with accusations of their profanity and 
immorality. These rough-living miners, unknown 
to themselves, were the advertisers of a coming 
superior mental culture, which would do much 
for Utah's future. 

When I saw the skilled miner, and the skilled 
mineralogist at work with their machinery, as 
nicely fitted for its task as a watch's mechanism, 
I saw the mastery of mind over minerals, as I 
had seen it over men. Whose eyes saw and whose 
purpose sought out this secreted wealth? It was 
the scientific miner, the chemist, the mineralogist, 
the capitalist, the economist and publicist. One 
and ^all, they united their heads and hands to do 
it. Of the wealth that they won from the rocks, 
some of it is in banks, some in ships, some in news- 
papers, some in books, and some in great indus- 
trial plants. Little of it is lying idle, for the men 
who made this wealth were not idlers. Both Gen- 
tile and Mormon have had a hand in the making 
of a State and a Star in the constellation of the 
Union. 



CHAPTER XX 

A LATTER DAY VIEW OF A LATTER DAY STATE 

"Often do the spirits of great events stride on 
before the events, and in to-day already, walks to- 
morrow." Coleridge 

I REMEMBER that it was the great fear of 
the Gentile and liberal element in the Terri- 
tory, that if the United States Congress gave state- 
hood to the people, a return to the old order of 
religious and political tyranny would begin. That 
in due time the newer element would be driven 
out by the usual political methods, or a terrorism 
reign, like that in the Southern States over the 
colored voter. 

Statehood came in due course, but none of the 
fears of the Liberals were realized. The people 
seemed to have caught the free spirit of a free 
country and realized that they were a part of a 
great and growing republic. They immediately 
divided on all political questions into the two great 
party organizations, the Republican and the 
215 



216 Tenderfoot Days 

Democratic. Their religious affiliations did not 
override their party affiliations, as a general rule, 
and the great bugaboo of the alarmists was gone 
like a nightmare dream. Utah had come to its 
own consciousness of popular life, and had decided 
that everything should go along on normal and 
popular lines. The worth of commercial and re- 
ligious interests should be decided, solely, by the 
merits of the interests involved, and the prefer- 
ences of a free people. 

Thus many found their fears to be no more 
real than worries. The reformers found reform 
was still alive, and vital enough to make for bet- 
ter things. The reactionaries found past bitter- 
nesses were hardly at home in the bosoms of a 
newer generation. 

Some abnormal conditions, like polygamy, died 
slowly, since the welfare and rights of wives and 
children could not be ruthlessly disregarded. Time 
is always softer hearted, in human history, than 
the extremist and reformer. So we note how time 
allowed a revelation to come, through the proper 
way, and it was announced that it was no longer 
an "order of Heaven" to live one's religion in 
the bonds of polygamous marriage. It gradually 
declined, but of course, being a social condition, 
its actual cessation took some time. It is about 
dead, at this writing, save in a few isolated cases, 



A Latter Day View of a Latter Day State 217 

contra leges, and this is found in every well con- 
ducted country. There are always law breakers 
of some sort, but the law always prevails until 
war or revolution breaks the peace. 

No such effort was made to fight for polygamy 
as was made for slavery for the simple reason that 
no money value was at stake in the former "twin 
relic of barbarism," while it was very prominent 
in the latter. A man's "niggers" brought him in 
money while a man's wives cost him a great deal 
of money. So the Mohammedan tinge to the Ter- 
ritory died out when statehood was fully estab- 
lished. Those who had invested in polygamy and 
were deeply involved as to character and social 
standing through its practice, fought even to the 
floor of the United States Senate for its existence 
and "their right." Nothing harsh was done to the 
offenders for the reason that this condition was 
due to previous religious convictions and teaching; 
but it was very soon evident that Utah, like other 
states, must be monogamous in its domestic life 
in harmony with the custom of the country. 

Some foolish people who persisted, as they will 
in anything religious that conflicts with the State, 
in the practice of polygamy, found themselves un- 
der arrest and in prison where they posed as mar- 
tyrs of religious persecution. Some people pitied 
them, but the majority laughed at them since this 



2i 8 Tenderfoot Days 

was at the close of the Nineteenth Century, and 
was not in the Middle Ages. 

Thus the years, and the "Age-Patience," which 
with the "Time-Spirit" does wonderful things for 
us, shelved this heated question, and it faded away 
like the light of a day that is dead. The mixed mul- 
titude was the agent of the change. The fanatical 
cannot last long where isolation ends, and contact 
with the world begins. Here is the reason for the 
call of the zealot, "Come out of her, my peo- 
ple!" whether that call be voiced by a Hebrew 
of the Hebrews, like Isaiah, or a Christian like 
Athanasius, who gloried in standing ''''contra mun- 
dum," or an ecclesiast like Torquemada, opponent 
of all heretics, or a Brigham Young against a mod- 
ern world. Religion, if it is to live, must live 
right up against the world in which it lives, and 
mellow it with good living. It will surely die if it 
hides itself in monastic cloisters, beneath a nun's 
garments, or rejects the law of the monogamous 
life, the while men and women are being born in 
just equal numbers all over the habitable world. 

Now view this state as a place to live in. It 
is a goodly land since its soil is of the richest. I 
used fairly to ache, when my horse's feet turned up 
the finest garden ground, growing only sage brush, 
on the mesa or bench-land about the base of the 
mountain ranges. I am an agriculturist in my 



A Latter Day View of a Latter Day State 219 

tastes, and it seemed such a waste for all this soil 
to produce no more than coarse brush. Of course, 
the rainfall was too meagre for "dry-farming," 
as they then thought. It can be done, and is be- 
ing done, in these days of the more scientific cul- 
ture of the soil. The snow-water of the great 
ranges is ample for the cultivation of every foot 
of good ground, if conserved in reservoirs, until 
the heated season calls for its use. Here is where 
capital and science can double Utah's acreage. 

Then think of the climate of this land. There 
is just enough winter to put "glame" into the at- 
mosphere. Bright days and a generous sunlight 
paint everything richly vivid. The oxygen of the 
hills makes the eyes sparkle, the blood to flush 
the cheeks redly, and gives the hands the grip 
which full labor requires. The very grain grown 
feels this climatic impulse, and the flour of Utah 
wheat has a golden tint, shown in the bread-loaf, 
and tasted in its good flavor. The fruits too, nota- 
bly the peaches and apples, have a taste out-rival- 
ing such products in California. 

More than soil and climate and the fruits of 
their union are visible in Utah's future. Uncle 
Sam has a pocket-book in its mountain ranges. A 
clasp holds the contents very tightly: gravity has 
its strong hand on these treasures. Still Industry, 
Understanding, Patience, Skill, and Capital, are 



220 Tenderfoot Days 

the five fingers of another hand which can un- 
clasp this hold of gravity on these hills, and allow 
the wealth to pour out, in such rich recoveries of 
ore as have made Bingham and Big Cottonwood 
Canyons famous. There is enough in Utah to 
keep generations busy with the soil and water and 
with the pocketed ores of the hills. Such industry 
will make comfortable, and therefore happy, my- 
riads of homes to be established in this state. 

So wide a physical outlook should have a coun- 
terpart in a metaphysical one. The mind of the 
people, in this age of free mentality, should also 
expand to consider and solve great questions of 
intellectual, philosophical, social and religious im- 
portance. All these realms of mind are necessary 
to make a population worthy of the land which 
they inhabit, and out of whose generous bosom 
they draw their physical life. 

Yet what is physical life worth, if it does not 
give the opportunity to climb higher to those meta- 
physical realities which lie back of, and are the 
cause of, these physical appearances. We say 
that we see, we touch, we taste, and so these things, 
sensible to us, are real. But we know that these 
things change and decay. All this phenomenal ex- 
istence, with its display of beauty, power and pro- 
duction, is for the use of the minds which are 
superior to these phases of matter. 



A Latter Day View of a Latter Day State 221 

Utah, rich in material wealth to come, should 
also produce a richer metaphysical wealth, in the 
mental and moral intelligence of the people, and 
that acquisition will entitle them to be called, of 
a truth, the Saints of the Latter Days. 



